


The Midnight Sun

by besque



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 22:46:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 51,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besque/pseuds/besque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Currently under very slow rewriting<br/>Post Book-One AU where everyone survives and no one learns.</p><p>Tarrlok ran away with Noatak in the storm;<br/>Amon showed up to Korra’s challenge alone;<br/>Many others seem to share the habit of running after Noatak;<br/>Pretty much all of the middle-aged LoK characters go way back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Art of Breathing

They certainly don't have forests like this in the south, and the twenty-year-old finds no love for it. Every now and then she has to jog up to keep him in sight. There's something condescending to even his footprints, which are just distinguishable enough as if they are left as a favor. Refraining from calling out his name and asking him to slow down, Korra deepens these footprints with her smaller ones while trying to avoid misshapen roots lurking under the snow. She's practically running after him now.

Like some aged hunter chasing an oryx-pinto way too fast for you.  _Pathetic_.

Already, she's regretting this.

* * *

A month earlier, after Katara's funeral, Korra has scrawled a note, packed a yak skin bag before sneaking out of the White Lotus compound.

_Sorry guys. I need answers and I need to find them alone. Don't worry. I'll be back, safe and sound as always._

_And Bo, please take good care of Naga for me. You know what she loves to eat._

More than five weeks it's taken her to find this town without people recognizing who she is. From the South Pole to the Northern Water Tribe, one of the longest route known to man.  _There's no other choice_ , on her fifth ferry ride in three weeks, leaning against the cold wall in her cabin, the Avatar reminds herself queasily and gazes out to the half-moon looming over the sea, before puking into a bucket.

In the past three years, she's gone into the Avatar State five times. All unwillingly. Korra has watched—from above, the last time with Aang standing right next to her—that thing slaughter and set streets on fire burning for days.

"Stop this," she'd beg, "take my bending away… Just make it stop."p

"I can't help you, Korra. It doesn't work like that. You'd have to find the answers by yourself."

No matter how hard she tried to meditate she couldn't find a way to connect with him again. Her friends have been understanding. They have done everything.

Well, almost everything.

I really tried, Korra murmurs to no one in the cabin. A few seconds later she jumps at the broadcast on the deck: the ship's sailing into Fire Nation waters. Checking the map once more, she realizes it'd take a few more weeks to get to the North Pole. Half way there.

Following are twenty days of sea-sickness and ostrich-horse-sickness. Korra swore to all the spirits she knew the names of that she'd never again travel this far alone and unprepared. At the end of the search, no longer counting on the sorry map of hers, she'd been inquiring the way of local villagers, none of whom had recognized her face. Knowing nothing about their new identities, it hadn't been easy locating two people out of thin air. However, slowly she managed to put the little pieces into a complete tangram, with determination she didn't know she had. Finally the name Kassuq caught her attention—newcomer, Water Tribe origin, with a younger brother, in their early forties. Those and a vague address, nothing more. One step closer.

If it weren't for the familiar accent in the last couple of days, Korra would have been in disbelief that she's in Water Tribe territory. She's now far away from the capital Pakak, where her relatives live (even though she's never been particularly fond of that family, she's always liked the city). Shabby houses give way to shabbier ones as her journey continues, while other signs of modern civilization fade away at the same pace. She can't remember having a proper night of sleep in—well, it's even harder to tell now that the sun has officially become hostile. There are only beats of dreaming she engages in every now and then, until she wakes up in a sweat realizing it's time to move on. The surroundings have given way to a consciousness that there is a surrounding.

She tells herself it's because of the midnight sun. Late June, days in the North are way too long for any kind of decent rest to speak of. Growing up in the South Pole, she's no stranger to these white nights. Yet she's never gotten used to it like the rest of her people. As a child, she'd spend weeks sulking in her bedroom, her eyes bloodshot like a neurotic rabbit-mole.

Korra makes herself quicken her pace.  _Almost there._

The Avatar, a top-notch firebender, has packed two lighters in her bag but forgotten to bring a watch. When she's finally on the porch of a humble, two-storied house, Korra can only assume by the rumbling of her stomach it's sometime in the afternoon. So this is it, the former leader of the Equalists, causing so much chaos that to this day people are still cleaning up after him. And if she were to find the answers as told, this should be it. Korra knocks at the door, lips moving quickly, mumbling the speech she'd prepared.

A woman answers the door. Early thirties, much taller than Korra and, well, a baby in her arm.

"Hello?"

"Hi… sorry, I'm looking for uh… Kassuq?" Wrong address, say it, say it. Say there is no Kassuq.

The woman turns back to the living room. "Kassuq! Someone at the door for you!" Korra feels her heart lurch. The baby grins at her.  _Run, Avatar_. Footsteps, heavier ones. _It's not too late. Shake those legs_. The woman beams at Korra and then walks back into the living room.  _Disappear. Use your earthbending._

For a moment the Avatar seriously considers the option to duck underground. Not quick enough. There he is, Kassuq, standing right in front of her. Korra has rehearsed this more than a dozen times in her head—none of the scenarios have managed to include this. He doesn't seem surprised. She was sure there'd be some kind of drama…

All she gets as a reaction is his eyes narrowing as if trying to remember her name, his hand dusting imaginary dirt off the doorknob. Three years have done nothing to his face—well, maybe not nothing. His hair is much longer than hers, half of it tied into a wolf tail. Korra glues her gaze at his eye level, refusing to look at anything below his neck.

There should be words coming out of people's mouths.

"Hi," he says. Clearly, Korra is just some girl next-door here to borrow an egg.

"Hi?" 

He fully steps out of the door, leaving a crack open. There are people talking inside, some kind of domestic joy leaks out of the house. Korra cranes her neck, trying to look inside but he towers over her so completely she has to back away.

 _Is it too late to go back now and pretend nothing happened?_  

She clears her throat. "Is this a bad time?"

"No at all. Just some friends playing Pai Sho over drinks."

It takes Korra physical effort not to react extremely. "Friends? PaiSho?  _You_." she blurts out and regrets immediately. He shrugs, with an air so laid-back it makes her bristle.

"So... wait, you are not surprised to see me?"

He shrugs slightly, then folds his arms. "It took you longer than I expected, though."

Korra recalls the woman's warm, soft smile. She's prepared for strangeness but not  _this_  much of it. "Right _,_ " she says as flatly as possible, "um, your wife seems nice."

He frowns for a second; then his face eases into an irritating beam. 

Korra looks away. "So where's your brother?"

"Out grocery shopping. We're having dinner with some friends." He tilts his head. "Care to join us?"

Korra scoffs—politeness really isn't her priority now. "And you expect me to say yes?"

"I certainly hope you would."

Korra rubs her temples. The light inside the house escapes from the window and envelops the porch with a drowsy, warm haze; she feels sick.

"Would you like to come in?" Noatak says. It doesn't at all sound like a question.

Korra shakes her head excessively. "Can we talk somewhere else in private? I know you've got house guests, but—"

This is cut off by his sudden reaction. Noatak shuts the door, grabs her upper arm. A terrible familiarity, of the fluidity in his actions, makes her stomach sink. And just like that they start walking, side by side at first, with Korra stealing glimpses from him—his skin is still a shade paler than normal, his face unreadable. Korra looks down at her own clothes: the palettes of their outfits have, to some extent, swapped. She is wearing a black jacket and dark maroon riding pants, and he a blue overcoat and brown snow boots.

The absolute silence between them somehow makes the walk easier. Korra isn't sure if she has any breath to talk anyway. But the weight of the absurdity of everything doesn't get any lighter. But... Amon with a family, a wife, a  _kid_ , friends— _playing_   _PaiSho!_

Several times she opens her mouth then lets out nothing but visible breaths. With no idea where he's taking her, she realizes it's come to the point where asking anything now would just make her sound stupid. Meanwhile, it's getting harder to keep up with his stride. Veering off of the road, they head into a forest. _Well maybe this is how it ends, maybe this is where I die_. Quickly acknowledging the unlikeliness of the thought, Korra then says to herself,  _You've come this far, what have you got to lose now?_  Following his steps with a sort of ridiculous resolution, Korra catches one last glimpse of the white sun before they enter the woods—almost ill, it looks. Doesn't even bother to sting her eyes.

* * *

By the time they stop, Korra is seeing red spots. Resting her hands on her lap, the Avatar stomps a boulder out of the ground and throws herself on it. A few steps away, with his arms folded across his chest, Noatak flashes a smile that she decides is irritating. She glowers, knowing perfectly well why he's gloating: three years since the last time she saw him—which  _should_  have been three more years of training and combat experience for her, and three years of aging for him. And yet here they are, the younger waterbender panting violently while the older one awaits her first word with irritating patience.

"Where the hell are we?" Her voice doesn't sound hers.

"You wanted privacy." He makes the gesture of inviting. "What's more private than this?"

With what's left of her pride, Korra turns some snow into ice water, drinks in one gulp. A brain freeze follows.

No longer feeling her heartbeat pounding in her ears, Korra decides to get a hold of herself and start talking business. But the speech she's prepared seems to have fallen out of her head somewhere along the way.

"So… yeah, I'm gonna get right to it," she starts with no idea where she's going with this. "I kinda need your help with something. I…uh." She studies her feet. "I kinda need to learn, um, how to resist bloodbending."

His expression remains still.

Maybe she should not have started with blunt truth. But she does need to learn the technique. There are more bloodbenders in the city than expected—evidently it isn't that rare a gift. Most of them are not so skilled at bloodbending itself—child's play, compared to Noatak and Tarrlok, though they'd done a decent good job hiding their identities.

It seems that post-Revolution criminals learned to locate their headquarters underground just like the Equalists did. Only this time, Korra has more qualms: if she were to go into the Avatar State in a confined space, with her friends and associates around… She'd never been able to bring herself to finish the thought until the day it actually happened.

It was a raid against an underground narcotics factory, where waterbenders would extract the essence out of magnolia and opium. The raid itself was standard enough, until one of the captive panicked and tried to bloodbend his way out. He wasn't even doing much damage. But before she realizes what was happening, the entire scene turned from a raid into an execution.

Four dead, eleven injured. That was the last time she went underground. It was not the end of her streak of destructive Avatar State.

At the moment, Noatak seems to be fascinated by a tree.

Korra coughs uneasily into her palm. Certainly she is not going to tell him any of this. That she's still  _all_   _wrong_. That she's still every bit of the half-baked Avatar three years ago, if not worse— _at least she was not killing anyone_.

It's best to let him think that she's somewhat realized.

The silence between them begins to feel too dense.  _Do something_. She bends out another boulder right next to him.

"You want to take a seat?"

He sits down as Korra keeps maundering, more to herself now, "I know what you must be thinking—I should have asked Katara, right? Not sure if you learned this, but she passed away, a month ago." Her throat tightens. "I would go into the Avatar State—no I mean, I can, totally, whenever I want." She wonders how quickly her lie will fall apart, seeing that Noatak has witnessed firsthand all the mess she's capable of making. "But… basically, I don't want to make a big fuss every time someone tries to, you know, trap a mouse."

For some reason they both seem to find this amusing. The chuckles are dry but the mood lightens up a notch.

"Look, Noatak." The first time his name comes out of her in three years. He shuffles about slightly. "I know this is all strange," Korra says, "you having a family and all that… So don't feel obligated to say yes. I can always ask someone else." She can feel the prepared speech rushing back. "See, I know things got really messed up between us—well, not  _us_  us, there's no  _us_ —I mean." A deep breath.  _Pull yourself together_. "The situation is, let's just say, a bit murky, but changes are happening. A while ago, I proposed something to President Reiko. A lot of your former followers have agreed to work with the law enforcement on busting triads so as to, frankly, avoid or reduce prison time. Turns out jail isn't big enough to hold up half of the non-bending population. Who would've thought. So, all things considered, it wasn't a bad deal. "

She pauses and waits for him to say something. He's back on studying the damn tree. Korra sighs and continues, "So yeah, technically these non-benders are on parole, but they're doing well most of them, in case you're wondering. Also, about one third of the police are non-benders now—mostly because of, well believe it or not, your doing—anyway, going off on a tangent here. Point is—"

Noatak stands up so quickly it startles her a little. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay," he says, "I'll teach you. Consider it done. Come on, I'm starving." He walks a few steps away then turns around to a Korra-shaped statue, his smile distant. "You coming?"

Korra bends the boulders back into the ground. "That's it? You are not curious why I wanted to learn?"

A shrug.

"So,  _how_  does this work, then?"

"I'll be worrying about the details. Come on, now. Let's go home."

He talks to her in a way as if they have known each other and been living together for years. And somehow Korra has to once again remind herself that he has a family. Tracking their earlier footprints side by side, the Avatar and "Kassuq" start to walk home.

Compared to the awkward chase earlier, their pace back is almost leisurely.

Now, the original idea is to bring him back to the city. Clearly he's more than capable of assuming another identity. But the almighty plan sort of fell apart when his wife answered the door.

Eventually it becomes imperative that she asks, "I still don't get it—so do I stay here for a few days?"

He keeps looking straight ahead. "Yes."

"But … your wife doesn't even know who I am. How are you going to pull off all this?" asks Korra. "Besides, I can't stay. I've already wasted two weeks finding this place; the city needs me to—"

A loud chuckle cuts her off. Korra immediately shoots back a glare. " _What_."

"The city has magically survived your absence once, for seventeen years," he says. "It did just fine back then; I strongly doubt it'll fall apart this time."

It takes all her strength not to smack his head now. "As I was saying—there's a lot on the line right now. I can't stay for too long, and you can't just leave and ditch your wife and kid like that." His expression sill blank, Korra gives her own correctness and grace an A. "Speaking of, she seems great. What's her name? Where'd you two—"

Once again she's cut off, this time by his halt. "Seems awfully curious of you," he says with a crooked grin.

"I think it's called common courtesy?" Realizing her sudden high pitch, Korra clears her throat. "Maybe you want to look it up."

Turning away from him, Korra resumes walking but trips over a root. She manages to steady herself with some fire, then shows proud striding. He catches up within seconds.

She hisses, slowing down a bit.

"She's Tonja," says Kassuq, no apparent amusement in his voice. "The boy is named Tullik."

"What _ever_. It's not like I'll remember."

"I'm afraid you'll have to. And since you're going to live with us, better come up with a name of your own right now."

Korra rolls her eyes so hard it gives her a small headache. " _Right_. I'll just do that. Stay with you guys."

"All right, then go back." He stops again.

"What?"

"I said, go back," he repeats, standing a few steps behind her. "There's no fancy hotel in this town. Not even an inn nearby. So unless you want to sleep outside, I suggest you go back to the city before wasting my or your time."

Silence descends, Korra's first thought is to yell back, but she quickly comes to realize that she really, really did not think this through. Of course he's built a new life here. Of course you're not welcome. Come to think of it, far he's been treating her with nothing but condescension under creepy smiles. Her hands begin to shiver inside her pockets. Clenching them into fists, the Avatar breathes deeply and forces herself to meet his eyes.

"You know, it's your city, too," she says calmly as she can. "Well, it  _was_ , before you toss everything you have worked on like a cigarette butt."

His bottom lip gives a twitch. It should not satisfy her this much to know that she can, after all, make some kind of impact on him. But it does. She presses, "Have you thought about your former followers once ever since I got here? Don't you think it's just a little weird that I had to  _volunteer_  their information?" She can feel her face going red. "By the by, does your pretty wife know about her husband's little secrets? About the war he started and the ugly mess he left in a city that is the beacon of modernity? Let me guess, to her you're just some charming fella moving back from the city, looking for a quiet little place to settle down, have a bag of cute babies and live happily ever after, and  _bam_! Guess what! Ten years later, turns out your kid's a waterbender, too! What then, hmm? Are you going to teach him how to Destroy the Avatar and Restore Balance? Are you going to have  _him_  finish your father's dirty work?"

A couple of polar squirrels scamper off a tree behind her. Buzzing noises. The rays pain in her head radiate sideways and down her neck. She'd throw up but there's only air in her stomach. Korra puts a hand on her heart and then, realizing the theatricality of the gesture, assumes a more casual position and waits for the nausea to fade.

She finds Noatak combing his hair with one hand and—she closes her eyes for more strength—grinning some more.

"Charming, your say?" he says.

Korra grimaces. "What?"

He reaches out a hand to her. "Move. I'm hungry."

"Huh?"

His hand still in the air, he sighs through his teeth. "Are you quite done. Can we go now."

Always this terrible, terrible dance. Korra bends the snow under his feet into a snake, aiming for that hand. His wrist barely moves before it freezes and shatters. As always he just keeps  _dodging_.

"Fight back, coward!" But somehow it feels familiar, and (could it possibly be?) _right_ , for Korra to lash out without a second thought, to  _have_   _him_  have her outmatched. If he chi-blocks… so what? If she can just whack the  _grin_  off that face…

It doesn't take much effort to close in on him when he's not even moving. There's a kind of weariness in his eyes, and Korra starts stumbling—it doesn't hurt that much with adrenaline blinding her sense for pain. He grabs her by the arm and holds her too close. "We ended on such frosty terms, Korra," says Amon, a smile throughout. Korra watches his breath form in the air. She doesn't panic.

"If I remember correctly, the last time I did this"—his hand sneaking around the back of her neck, searching—"things did not work out so well."

Korra lets out a chuckle, which sounds more like a low, short pant. "Tell you the truth, I can't control the Avatar State" A spot on her back found then—unclogged. Pain pours in steadily from there. She wheezes out a curse. "Just so you know, it's possible I'll actually kill you this time."

He nods, assuming a serious expression. "Consider me told."

Each inhalation invites more needles dancing on her spine. "Pretend all you want." Korra breathes out. Only out. "But this…  _this_  is what you are—bloodbending for justice my ass. You  _enjoy_  this."

Curiously, she finds no worry for herself—she's a mess of an Avatar who can't give people their whatever back,  _whatever_. She only goes into the Avatar State when furious. And right now, no longer bewildered by his mask of hospitality, she feels far more acquainted with the Noatak whose hand is crawling down her back. This is what it _should_  have been. She returns a smile, and is sure it turns out skewed.

"I do find myself enjoying this," he says, studying her face, and does not sound ironic this time. "Thank you for pointing that out."

"You got it," says Korra, ignoring the clashing sound inside her. Well, you kind of asked for it, she thinks, her lungs already out of air to exhale. Inhaling again would probably lead to a coma.

The grip loosens a notch. She can breathe now, still unable move a muscle. The image of him holding her in the woods like this could look kind of sweet from afar. "Is this a first lesson?" she asks, feeling her limbs again. "Intro to your method of teaching?"

"Not really. Just wanted to see something for myself."

"And if I stay, there's more of this?"

"I'm not sure," he says, leaning forward, his lips almost touching her forehead. "You tell me."

"You have a wife, pal," says Korra, not entirely sure who she's trying to warn.

Letting her out of the bloodbending grip but still holding her, he says quietly, "Do you feel ashamed?"

The pain recedes as quickly as it comes. Now that she can move, Korra finds herself frozen to the spot. Quick, say something witty.

"Go to hell."

"Which one?" he asks, tilting her head with one hand, inching even closer. "I've lost track of the mistakes I've made."

But there is no seeming confession in his eyes. Korra flinches at this; she wriggles out of his arms. "Very cute, bub. Can we please go now?"

Noatak gives the after-you gesture, but then pulls her back again. "One more thing, though," he says amicably. "Don't ever mention my father again."

He waits patiently until Korra finally gives a nod.

As they reach the edge of the woods, Noatak has already come up with a story for her. Sinaaq, his distant relative decides to pay a visit from the United Republic. Somewhere along his fabricating, Korra finds herself impressed by how fluently he vamps up details and anecdotes, to the point she doubts he knows a person like this in real life.

"Your parents were born and raised here. Your father, my oldest brother, died eighteen years ago. A pack of silver wolves caught him off guard on a hunting trip. You were too young to remember the whole thing," he says. "Devastated, your mother moved to Republic City, where my younger brother took you guys in and helped raising you. You remember little about life in the North Pole, and that's why you aren't accustomed to the traditional styles of Water Tribe living."

" I am actually comfortable with the old ways of—"

"You're closer to my brother Aluk." Noatak cuts her off, "which, technically, is not untrue."

Korra doesn't have time to make a dismissive noise. She chants the names glumly until they start to sound like meaningless syllables. "I'm Sinaaq, Tarrlok is Aluk; there's Tonja… and you're Kassuq. Got it. Wait—what's your kid's name again?"

"The boy is named Tullik, ten months old," says Kassuq as they step into the sunlight again. Korra squints: the sun is still bright. It could be evening.

She convinces herself that she agrees to do this as a token of good manner, and that she's no longer a spoilt child. She couldn't care less about the physical threats, or even torment, but she isn't sure if she can endure another hour alone with this man. Casting a quick glare at him, she meets his even gaze.  _So you've made another bad decision_. Big deal.

Their little "reunion" in the woods should of course remain a secret. This place, out of the grip of modern technology, is one of those towns where everyone knows everyone. As they get back to the main street Noatak keeps greeting villagers, so affable it makes Korra's insides writhe. These people make no effort to hide signs of curiosity. Korra shares certain features with them, but her head-to-toe black get-up, which she now regards slightly ridiculous, is standing out in a sea of blue in various states of shabbiness. Good thing she's used to people staring,. Her attentions is given to the smell of food escaping from people's homes as they cut through the neighborhood—it lures a rumbling sound out of her stomach.

She makes herself focus. It's not even her hometown. Nostalgia is pointless.

When they're on the porch again, Noatak somehow has a whole different face.

"Mind you, think twice before speaking. In fact, try silence for once, you might find it refreshing," he says without sounding menacing, and wipes the sheen of sweat on Korra's nose away with a thumb, she doesn't flinch. His thumb lingers until she gives a mechanical nod.

Three knocks on the door, the sound of people talking, footsteps, and hopefully, answers. Korra gulps thickly and holds still.

The resolution of being ready for anything falls quickly apart when she's greeted by an artificial hand, and then, pink scar tissues on… well, everywhere. Starting from the chin, they shroud the entire right side of his face, invading his hairline.

Tarrlok returns her stare with equal astonishment.

"Look who's here, Aluk!" says Noatak with huge joviality, "Remember Sinaaq?"

It's truly amazing how quickly Tarrlok collects himself. "Of course,  _Sinaaq_ … It's—been a while." Here his voice pitches high. "Come on in."

* * *

The smell of seaweed soup attacks. For a moment it feels so ridiculously familiar she wants to cry. The inside of the house is as humble as its exterior suggests, but it's cozy and all heart. The room immediately quiets down at their entrance. Korra is finally greeted by the source of the chatting sound, four people around a wooden table near the kitchen. One of them she's already met: the baby, Tullik, now held by another man. Korra unwittingly inches closer to Noatak, who is also looking around, searching.

"Where's Tonja?"

"She's preparing dinner," says Tarrlok as Tonja steps out of the kitchen at the sound, cupping her hands around a pot.

"Ah… hot, ho—hot," she hisses, putting it on the table. Tarrlok clears his throat uncomfortably. "We have an extra guest—" he says, looking at Korra as if he's forgotten her name. The older brother carries on, "—Sinaaq, everyone, all the way from Republic City to pay us a visit."

"A blood relative, Sinaaq is," adds Noatak, putting a hand on Korra's shoulder.

She manages to hold still. There's a dimple when his face lights up like this, Korra notices as she squeezes out a smile, to which the hostess returns a much more genuine one.

Tonja drags another chair to the table. "Yeah, we met earlier today. Didn't quite get a chance to learn your name before you two just ran off like that."

"I took some time to show her around," says Noatak. "This is Tonja. Tonja, Sinaaq."

Tonja walks across the room with a springy stride. "What a lovely surprise," she says, drying her hand on the apron. "This is the first time I've met someone from their family."

Korra shakes that hand, surprised by the modernity in her etiquette and the calluses under her fingers. "Nice to meet you," says the Avatar, trying to breathe some enthusiasm into her words. "I didn't know No-Kassuq had such a beautiful wife. When did you two meet?"

Tonja squints, her expression rich and open, occasioning little wrinkles under her eyes. " _We_  are not married. He's my brother-in-law." She looks back at Tarrlok, whose eyes are glued to the floor. "I'm married to Aluk."

A few seconds pass before things sink in. "You—" Glaring at Noatak, Korra finds him covering his face with one hand, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, his shoulders slightly trembling. The muscles on Korra's arms twitch instinctively, she bites her lip. Don't make a scene, do not make a scene now… The Avatar compromises, punching him in the arm. He doesn't wince but no longer bothers to stifle his laugh.

As Korra stands there processing the sheer surreal-ness of  _hearing Amon laugh_ , Tarrlok clearly realizes what's been going on.

He sighs his way to the dinner table, and then says to his brother, somehow with a parental voice, "Tonja told me you had a visitor earlier. She didn't mention it was Sinaaq."

His good hand mechanically taps the wooden one. He seems to do that, a lot. Somehow the name Sinaaq sounds so venomous in his mouth. Like he's describing her as a disease.  _Early on-set Sinaaq_   _is incurable but manageable…_ Korra gives Noatak a glower, then joins the others at the table. Finally finished with his  _laughs_ , Noatak sits right next to her.

Looking reasonably confused, Tonja begins to introduce her to the other guests. The Avatar goes through the motion without making a real effort to remember their names. Though Konska, the lanky young man who's been holding the baby in his arms, does remind her of a shy White Lotus guard Howl. She greets each every one of them in Water Tribe fashion.

The awkwardness becomes less noticeable once dinner starts. By now hunger is boiling to the point where it feels liable to tear holes in her. Korra launches her attack at the plate of salmon first. It must be the heat that's making her eyes watery, it can't be the sound of people chattering and laughing, being people. Korra sniffs faintly. She's been eating too much too fast, that's all.

A bowl of seaweed soup is put in front of her. "Slow down," comes a small voice beside her. Putting the chopsticks down dizzily, Korra looks across the table: the baby is mumbling something as Tonja grinds his food with a spoon. Next to her, Noatak is answering another question about Sinaaq's life story.

Amid this annoying joy, Korra's uneasiness is only equaled by Tarrlok's. His sulking game has reached a whole new level since she last saw him. Even his good hand speaks in better spirit than his face does, as his brother goes on and on about Sinaaq: at each mention of Korra's fake name, it gives a twitch; at each mention of his own fake name, it gives a twitch.

It finally becomes too hard to watch him. So Korra sets herself on eating. In terms of culinary arts, Tonja is the exact opposite of Pemma. Korra knows proper training means nothing without a proper diet. She's taught herself to like lean meats and egg whites, to at least swallow bok choy and, spirits, raw almonds.

But Korra is also nothing if not proper Water Tribe. When her tongue reunites with fried deep-sea fish, she closes her eyes.

"Boy, what was I thinking—" says Tonja, "we should open up the good stuff. I think we have some Rouge Dew left."

Her proposal wins a round of actual cheer—even Tarrlok hmphes and shifts a little. Korra has heard of this ancient wine from Asami, who has also politely pointed out, after a few unfortunate incidents, that someone with Korra's tolerance should not be drinking rice wines like this.

How these people could afford or have access to a wine this expensive is beyond her.

"You're old enough to drink, right?"

It takes Korra some time to realize the question can only be directed at her. Before she can say anything, a firm, jolly _Sure_ comes from Noatak.

What the hell, it can't get any weirder than this. One drink though, just one and that's it, Korra tells herself. 

The glass pushed in front of her is, again, surprisingly modern, and of an unusual size; too big for a shot glass and too small for wine. Well,  _that's_ reassuring.

This time they toast to some spirit Korra has already forgotten the stories of; her brows knit at the mossy taste, and she does not hate it. So, six full glasses later, having experienced the slight yet obligatory queasiness, Avatar Korra reaches a phase, where she can't remember a time in her life when she didn't know Konska, Aruq, Tusaq, baby Tullik and Tonja the pretty Water Tribe lady. Another hour later, Tarrlok's deadpan face has turned into a blur that Korra no longer wants to punch.

However, even as her breath smoothes and her light hazes, Korra still can't shake the physical presence of Noatak off her right side. 

She tastes lint under her tongue.  _If this wine really is the proverbial good stuff_ , Korra thinks, a wave of unwanted soberness is about to hit you in a few minutes. She resents the way her body protects itself in times like this.

A part of Korra always feels bad for never having been a full, fun drunk like most of her friends. Even sad drunk would be better than what she has: the joviality doesn't last nearly long enough, and she'd start falling in and out of an extreme clarity, while steading losing physical control. It really is the worst combination possible. Weighing on her right shoulder, Noatak's occasional glimpses seem to carry actual weight, because she finds herself inclining towards him. 

 _Maybe it's not a bad idea to start being_ pleasant _. Just for the hell of it._

A wave of laughter hits her, this time she greets it. Her mood, as Noatak fills up the glass at what must be the thirteen around, has become ridiculously light. She does make an attempt to cut her eyes at him during his made-up joke of how "Sinaaq" had not stopped wetting her bed until the age of eight. Her glower is answered by an affectionate—yet thorough—slap on her back that almost knocks things out of her. She knees him under the table, and is rewarded by a harsh squeeze on her upper arm masked as a stroke.

Korra hates this man so much it makes her heart beat very hard.  _Fine_ , so he's better at waterbending than she is. So she's never once defeated him without going nuts and wreaking havoc on the city. So he perhaps, sort of, just possibly, looks like a human male specimen. So when he laughs he has this dimple, in which Korra wants to inappropriately fit her (now slightly numb) little finger. So what! He's still a terrible human on all fronts.

And if three years ago Tarrlok didn't lie about their childhood, Noatak is most definitely a mass of unfortunate mental characteristics.  _Let's not forget, Avatar_ , just a few hours ago,  _he was toying with your reactions about him having a family, and obviously has enjoyed every bit of it. Just a few hours ago, he was_ bloodbending _you_.

Alarmed by this brief yet clear train of thought, Korra makes a stab at rejoining the dinner conversation, which has taken yet another turn and somehow she finds herself in a discussion about aura.  _Aura_ , of all things. Someone jokingly makes a comment that a murky energy is clouding Korra.

She doesn't' how to counter that.

"Yup," she says after a burp. This is meant to sound amicable but somehow it comes out bitter.  _Be pleasant, be nice. Fix. This_.

"Murkiness complements these biceps well," Korra addes, flexing her arm and accidentally elbowing Noatak.

Instinctively, she turns to him, ready to apologize. Possibly the second time they have made direct eye contact after they are back from the woods. Korra stares at him for a good moment, then swallows her apology and looks down at her glass. She can no longer feel her hands.

_So what if he's the best looking man she has ever met._

"Oh come on, Sinaaq. You know you look lovely," Tonja says, in a lilting northern accent. "Guys, stop teasing our guest."

Korra breathes out, closer to a point of her drunkenness where each breath threats to turn into flames. Well, breathing fire as a water tribe girl would be an efficient way to expose Noatak's lies.

Picturing it, she laughs for no good reason until she's close to tears.

* * *

After dinner, Korra pushes herself away from the table and mumbles something about helping to clean up.

Tonja studies her face. "Look at you, you are barely standing up straight," she says. "Besides, what kind of hostess would let a guest do the cleaning."

"I'm fine. Look, look." Korra puts a finger on her nose. "Wait, what's the point of this, I'm not driving."

"Yeah, that does it. Time to put you in bed." Tonja glances around and, failing to find Tarrlok, turns to her brother-in-law. "Do you think we should clean up the attic for Sinaaq?"

"It's too cold up there," says Noatak, sidestepping Korra with plates piled up in his hands.

 _Amon, doing dishes_. Then, his voice in the kitchen. "She sleeps in my room."

Korra leans on the counter, blinks hard, and finds herself too far gone to protest. Tonja says something about setting up the couch and leaves her in the living room. Her voice sounds like a fog horn.

She simply cannot deal anymore—with what to call him, what to think of him, or whether to even look at him or not. She needs to curl up and pass out in this perfect spiral daze.

A hand grabs her arm and leads her to the stairs. A hard collapse, on what feels like warm fur and smells like oud wood and some mixture of spices. With what's left of her other senses: the clock points at midnight; outside the window, the sky only a shade darker than noon.

"Can't," Korra mumbles.

"Can't what?" Her boots are getting pulled off. Blanket drawn to her shoulders.

"Can' sleep, too bright…"

She cracks open an eye. His hair is so long it's tickling her face.  _You're such an accident of a person_ , she can't tell if she's saying this out loud, or whom she's trying to address. There may have been a kiss on her forehead or nose or eyelid. And if she's just lucky enough, none of these have ever happened.  _It's just the Rouge Dew,_  the Avatar tells herself before everything falls mercifully dark,  _and you shouldn't have messed with it in the first place._

* * *

Of course it's just as bright when Korra, stabbed by a hangover, wakes up in different clothing. A dark blue dress, modern cut, comfortable, and  _clean_ , which means it can't be hers—all her clothes probably have things breeding on them at this point. Trying hard not to think about who changed her into this dress, she sits up groaning. Asami was right: the Avatar can't hold her liquor any more than she can drive a race car.

Now that she's come to realize whose bed she's been sleeping on, the headache intensifies a notch. Either for me or against me, she mumbles, addressing the daylight, or rather, the day.

In the bathroom, Korra is almost crushed by a chain of small tragedies. First she trips over the dress that is too long for her, and to keep balance she punches out a ball of flames, setting the shower curtain on fire. After she finally puts it out, a non-Avatar stares back at her in the mirror. No grace to speak of. While showering, she has a hard time convincing herself that coming here wasn't a mistake, and that everything, albeit highly strange, is going to work out for the best.

It's such a weak point to stand by, but she's determined to stay. Noatak is a shit, sure, but he said yes to her ridiculous request without any questions. Korra wonders if that is one of the perks of dealing with professional criminals. They always know exactly when to shut up. As for Tarrlok, he seems to have decided upon ignoring her altogether. Well, two can play this—she's not going to break first.

Do not stick your nose into their business, she reminds herself before the hot water runs out. You're here to acquire an advanced skill out of necessity, not to be the net over these eccentric siblings. And as a thank you to the former Equalist, she will not reveal his whereabouts to anyone.

It's already way more than what he deserves, all things considered.

A few minutes later, head still beating heart's rhythm, a seemingly normal Avatar is downstairs.

"Good afternoon, Sinaaq," says Noatak, smiling, in that smile is his guarantee that this will be anything but a good afternoon—of course he's the first one she sees in her most miserable.

Korra glances at the clock: half past three, so she's slept for either fifteen or twenty-seven hours straight. She decides it's the former, rubs her eyes, and sits by the table. "Where is everybody?"

"Out," he says, putting a yellow teacup with a chip in front of her, "shopping for the trip to the carnival. Elderberry tea?"

"Ew. No, thanks. Wait— _this_  place has a carnival?"

He pours her some tea anyway.

"I don't need this." Wincing, Korra pushes the cup away. "I need something to eat—what carnival?"

"I'm afraid you can't eat anything for now."

"Why not?" As soon as she hears herself she knows the answer.  _Training_ , today. Most likely the kind that requires an empty stomach. "Actually, don't answer that." She glimpses at the cup and sniffs. "By the way, if shit could shit its shit would probably tell you this smells worse than its own armpit."

"For your hangover." He sits across the table, pushes the teacup towards her. "Drink."

"Alright, buddy, I'm tired of asking.  _What carnival?_ " Upon the first sip, a grimace. "Tastes like shit, too, by the way."

"The nine-day carnival in Pakak celebrating the solstice," says Noatak patiently. "We talked about this last night. You don't remember?"

A fragment of conversation, free from its boozy context, floats up and gives Korra a chill. "Not really," she says, trying to gloss over her surprise at the name of Unalaq's town. How could she have forgotten all about it already? It's the same carnival she had been going to since she was a child, until two years ago.

"Pakak as in the capital?" asks Korra calmly, wondering if he knows about her kinship with Unalaq. "Isn't that like two hundred miles away?"

"And then some. Hence the word  _trip_."

"Well then, by Northern calendar–" she says, counting with a headache. "I'd have to master resisting bloodbending in… ten days, before I have to go back. Think you can manage that?"

"Oh, Korra." He places his hands on the table and pushes himself up.

For a man without a mask, he does such a good job of always looking slightly amused. Korra forces down another sip. "Is that a yes?"

This, the third private conversation they have had since her arrival, goes just about the same as the first two: Korra constantly wondering if fun is being made of her, Noatak oddly charged with either contemptuous optimism or jovial contempt, dodging whatever question she proposes with enviable ease. He refills her cup and walks upstairs. "Finish your tea. We leave in three minutes."

"Hello? Helleew!" Leaning backwards, she shouts at the empty staircase, "Fine! But I'm taking that as a yes! Ten days, tops!"

Korra smiles. She's already agitated and in mild pain but she smiles. At least it's the first time in months that she's been able to cease worrying without being drunk. Finally, the best possible distraction there is: a new form of fighting to learn. The Avatar is in her wheelhouse. For at least a week, she will be focusing on something other than the world outside Aipalovik, Korra's world, of enemies, press conferences, Task Force meetings. In this piss-poor village, there will be no judging eyes on her, no crushing guilt, no burning questions like  _Why can't I control the Avatar state?_ A small part of her is glad that she doesn't have to learn bloodbending in order to resist it. Noatak is, voluntarily and as always, the bad guy in this deal.

Although there is still one more question tickling her throat, about Tarrlok's face. Alone at the table, Korra fends off this flash of curiosity by giving the room a thorough inspection. The sun has the house in its hands. Ribbons of light filter through the blinds, warming and extending over her face, beyond the wooden floor, touching the arc above the kitchen door. It is when she rests her eyes on the beam with exuberant details that Korra realizes something incongruous about this place. This living room, albeit furnished in simple style, lends itself to a deserted beauty. She can vaguely tell that colors were everywhere before they started fading unevenly in some kind of purposeful oblivion. The owner seems to have made a conscious effort for everything, in the present day, to remain as austere as possible just so it would draw less attention. There is a five-bar fireplace with no photos above it. The only decoration is a tapestry, two kois, the pattern beneath a grown beige, barely recognizable.

The Avatar reviews the none-of-your-business speech as Noatak, dressed in black, emerges from the stairs. Now the colors of their clothes have swap back to what they had been three years ago. Korra catches his eyes, and looks away. He looks disturbingly more clean cut than yesterday. If she remembers correctly he drank as much as she did last night. In fact she  _made sure_  that he drank as much.

Once outside, the sunlight seems to be actually weighing on her eyelids. Behind her, Noatak locks the door and then tosses her a heavy cloak, which she holds high above her head like a standard. "Please don't tell me we're going back into the woods," grunts Korra. "Why can't I just learn here in the front yard? There's nobody around."

He walks past her. "Come on. Try and keep up."

* * *

The first half of their journey is rarely punctuated by words. Her first impression of this village, after the particularly tiresome search, is wrong. To fully appreciate a place like Aipalovik you'd have to survey its streets by feet. At various points along the way, houses fall in and out of rural gentrification. Uneven, this whole village is. Strangely, the passing faces make this walk a lot more tolerable. Korra has almost forgotten what it feels like to be greeted by people who don't know who she is.

As their walk gathers speed, Korra recognizes this to be the very road they had veered off of yesterday. "Wait…" She stops, pointing at another direction. "We should make a turn here."

Without looking back, Noatak keeps on going. Korra jogs up to him. "Hey! Where are you taking me?"

"You'll see."

"Just so we're clear," says Korra, "I'm here to learn how to resist bloodbending. That and that only. In other words, no more fooling around, no more—groping, or whatever the hell it is."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm not kidding, jackass!"

"Surely you are not." A sudden solemnity. "So as far as we're on the subject of ground rules, let's also be clear that I'm the instructor here. Therefore, you will talk to me in a socially acceptable manner in which you have addressed all the bending masters who have passed their skill sets onto you. In other words, no more jackasses, no more shits, or whatever the hell it is."

Korra concedes a gloomy nod. Noatak's voice softens a little. "I had a rather interesting conversation with my brother last night, after you went to bed."

"Oh yeah?" Korra chuckles. "Let me guess: he's not overly fond of my visit?"

His silence puts the matter beyond doubt. Korra kicks a pebble far beyond sight. "Whatever. Tell him I'll be out of his house in ten days."

"The thing you need to know about my brother," says Noatak, cutting a sharp left, "is that he means well—"

"Right."

"Now, what did we just agree upon?"

This time Korra does glare at him. "Fine. Go on."

"As you can see, he's still in the maze of past rooms," says Noatak, vaguely gesturing his own face, "and unfortunately, he does have a rather strong opinion about your intention to learn."

There's a brief silence that compels Korra to unleash what she's been holding.

"What happened to his face?" she asks, hating herself now. "I thought you were a healer."

So how long was that? Twenty minutes?

"You really want to know?" He slows his pace a bit, looking a lot more guileless than yesterday—whatever they talked about last night must have much to do with it. But she's not sure if she wants this honesty. She'd rather squabble with him about trivial, irrelevant things.

Korra looks pained. "No—yeah—not really… OK, just give it to me in a nutshell. I want the water-cooled version."

At this he smiles a mournful smile.

"What?"

"Trust me, soon you'll find it amusing," he says, and then tells in shorthand how they spent a week on an island after he saved Tarrlok's life, how they got rescued by a fishing boat from Fire Nation. Just that. Only that. With no emotions to speak of. "… our old neighbors did not recognize us. And we've been living in the old family house ever since."

This is said in a gnomic voice as if he's been nuncupating a memoir. Noatak, story finished, falls back in silence as they stop in front of an abandoned barn.

Korra slowly walks towards the locked double doors, and throws herself on a large stone in a vanquished position: head hung, eyes to the floor. You can't un-hear something like this. Yesterday when she knocked on the door she was filled only with her own troubles, her mind loosened by exhaustion, her eyes stunned by the proximity of an old foe, her body craving the blessed sleep. And now the situation has taken yet another ugly turn. Why this guilt again? Why always this crushing guilt?

Beside her, Noatak opens the doors. She follows him mechanically inside. Even for an abandoned place the barn looks pathetic. It's hexagonal, the roof broken, letting sunlight scissor through in slices. Heaps and heaps of hay on the sloping floor make it quite impossible to choose where to stand. Everything smells stale.

"It could use a cleanout," says Noatak and turns to Korra. Under the spotlights of dancing dust rimming about him, his ears appear translucent; his look remains opaque.

"Why?" says Korra dreamily, her mind elsewhere, "and more importantly—why?"

"A clear mind requires a neutral space," he says, reaching into the air in a demiurgic manner, as if trying to create a "neutral space" out of sheer will. Korra recognizes that voice. It has a visual of itself: resonant and unquestionable, delivered from the abdomen with little help from the throat. It takes her mind off Tarrlok effectively.

"Should I be writing this down or…" She raises a brow, making an effort to look uninterested.

"Remind me: what was the deal again?" He glances at Korra and, after receiving the resigned look, continues, "A virtual place where things—be that learning or contemplating—can be done in emptiness."

"So… a cavity," says Korra. "That's why we're not in the forest or your front yard."

"Exactly. Now, I assume you are apprised of the 'training' situation in our younger days?"

"You mean your 'hunting trips'?" Korra quotes with her fingers unnecessarily, and then her eyes widen. "Oh no nonono, that's—I'm not learning bloodbending, if that's what you're implying—"

He holds up a finger to silence her. "I see you have trouble recognizing a yes-no question, so I'll try and talk in terms you will understand." He takes off his coat, throws it on a pile of hay and starts shaking the mud off his boots. "Rest assured that I am most certainly not teaching you the technique itself," says Noatak slowly as if talking to a foreigner, "not because you have asked so, but because I have failed to see the point of doing that."

Korra shifts her weight to another foot, waiting to be provoked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means it's not something you learn," he says in a peculiar tone. Could that be pride on his face? "Unlike freezing water into ice, the ability to bloodbend is, and I quote, something you have."

This is exactly what she expects to hear. The Avatar is happily offended—no one in the White Lotus or in the city has ever said to her, "You can't learn this because you don't have what it takes." It's almost refreshing to have the channel untrammeled, free.

She feigns exasperation. "Good, like I care."

"Shall we?" He rolls up his sleeves, walks to the corner and, to her surprise, drags out a wheelbarrow.

"Are you serious?" says Korra. "We only have ten days and you wanna spend the whole time cleaning up this fairyland of crap?"

"It's not about physical training. Not today."

"What? But you said no eating…"

"Ah, that—well, people simply behave better when famished," he says, beckoning her to follow. "Feel free to be of assistance any time now. Use your bending, if you like."

Korra, being Korra, snaps her fingers. A ball of flame dances in her palm.

"What do you think you are—" Noatak turns around to a blazing mound of hay. "Extinguish it, now!"

"You just said use your bending," impersonates Korra. "It'd take days to clean all this out—you have to admit, this is much easier." She shrugs, archly innocent. "But hey, what do I know? I'm just some hungry idiot who happens to know how to shoot fire balls."

Sighing, Noatak tries to pull some water out of thin air. But it's too dry, and way too late—the flames are already licking his feet. He jumps backwards and stumbles over a lurking rake.

Bending over, Korra laughs (soberly) for the first time in months. It feels strange, her lips seem to have forgotten how to stretch into that angle.

"Oh man, you got rusty."

"Korra—I'm not joking—you'll set the whole place on fire!" he booms, balancing himself on one foot while putting out his boot with bare hands.

"Believe me, they don't call me Avatar for nothing." She reaches out a hand, and the fire around them dies down at once, forming a somewhat ritualistic circle without touching the wooden walls.

He does not look unimpressed, nor does he look in awe.

"What, no burning hatred for the evilness of firebending?" says Korra and immediately throws her hands up at his steely glance. "Kidding. Sheesh." And then, a hiss, "Ugh… guess I owe you a coat."

He waves this off. Korra bends two boulders from the ground, and makes a mock-polite gesture for him to sit first. With one hand she uses airbending to guild the thick smoke through a hole on the roof and then sits next to him. It's warm and quiet now, only the sound of cracking.

The thing you need to know about my brother is that he means well. Unanchored of their earlier conversation, his words meander into Korra's head. So do I, she thinks. The Avatar always means well. But she knows herself well enough: not much of a desired savior, more like an assigned prompter. She doesn't mean for anything to be like this, but it is like this—Avatar Korra, saying and always saying the wrong things, helping and always helping in the wrong way. Just as three years ago, when she opened the cell door and found them that patrol boat, she had not meant to tell Amon that you should take your brother and don't ever come back. Korra had meant to tell him that if you stay we can find a way to fix this city, together. She had meant to say, Please don't leave.

"Was it my fault?" she whispers and feels his gaze. A once mysterious and now painful presence.A few seconds later he puts a hand on her shoulder. She looks at him, and as Noatak nears her he blurs a little—maybe it's the heat, or the water in her eyes, or just the smell of hay burning, creating a somnolent atmosphere without the toxic smoke. These elements, her elements. When did they become a nightmare? He kisses her ever so lightly on the hair. Pulls her closer by the shoulder. She begins to cry. The tears are sharp and quick, for she's not particularly sad—Korra has made a habit of doing this every now and then just so the memory spasms would pass faster. A stranger could come in right now to this strange scene—Korra resting her head on his shoulder, her hands reaching out in a peculiar angle, controlling the flames encircling them—and think her insane. Korra cannot give an account of why it's happening, either. She does not get Tarrlok. To comprehend his choice she'd have to sit down with one of them taking her through the history of the past forty years.

"It seems that," says Noatak finally, "you have come here searching for the island where a ship was wrecked. Am I correct?"

Her answer is a loud sniff.

"But it's not your ship to lose, Korra. Nor are you the ship itself. And you are not the wave that had wrecked it," he says as the cleansing fire around them slowly comes to its end. "Earlier when I mentioned the training I'd been through as a child, my intention was not to make you feel incompetent. What I had meant to say was: once you decided to learn anything about bloodbending, even if it's, as you said, resisting and that only, you cannot go back. It is not something you can switch on and off at will, and I cannot foresee the consequences of this action. Therefore, I'm asking you one more time—now look at me in the eye and see I'm serious—" Korra pulls away. He wipes her tears off with his sleeve, and then tilts her chin up with a hand. "—are you certain that you want to be involved?"

Korra smiles tragically at that word. Involved. These days she hears it everywhere. The last time was when Asami said to her father through one of those little receivers in jail, "Mako and I are involved, Dad. You'll just have to deal with that." Behind the glass, Korra had seen the desperation on Hiroshi's face, but what could he have done about it? After all, the word itself sounds so righteous, so beautiful, as if it's such a great situation to be in, as if it's in our choice to get tangled in other people's webs, merging into each other. But honestly, Korra reflects, it's just exhausting. Involved was exactly what happened when she and Naga jumped on the ship from the South Pole to Republic City, when she challenged Amon on the radio and confronted Tarrlok in his office. She had done all those things on a whim, and now she has to face the consequences, for whether she likes it or not, becoming uninvolved, at this point, is simply impossible.

Biting her lips, she nods firmly. "I need to know how to deal with bloodbending without going into the Avatar State." And then she makes a face. "I'm sure you'll be a better teacher than your old man. Less dead animals, at least."

His jaw tightens. Korra tips her head back. "Sorry—it just got too intense for a second. Had to cut it down."

"All right, then." He stands up. "Help me clean out the ashes, would you?"

She does so by airbending. He was right: the barn, hollow and cavernous now, presents itself uncontaminated, as what she had felt in the spirit world. Korra crosses her arms and closes her eyes, indulging in being part of a neutral place like this.

"I have to admit," she says, nudging him with her elbow, "this isn't terrible. Can we start now?"

"Like I said, today is not about physical training," he says and leans against the dusty doorframe, eyeing her in a funny way. "Come here."

She takes a step away from him.

"Here means closer."

"Close enough." She stretches out an arm straight, her fingertip barely touching his chest. "See? At an arm's length, literally."

Looking away and breathing deeply, he grabs her wrist. As he pulls her close Korra yells, "I said no groping!"

He clenches his jaw again, this time wearily, and then puts a hand softly on her stomach. "Would you call this groping?"

"Depends. What are you doing?"

"We still have some time left before dinner." His hand inches up, to which Korra responds by actually jumping. "Calm down," he says frowning. "You're breathing all wrong."

"Doubt that." This Korra says with confidence. "If I were I wouldn't be able to firebend."

"Indeed." He raises an eyebrow expertly. "That's the problem. How long have you been breathing like this?"

"You mean through my lungs like a normal human being?"

"I mean through your chest like an amateur," he says. "You're too tense. Relax."

Korra loosens up a bit reluctantly. She does not see the problem—she's breathing the exact way she's been told by her firebending teacher, and it works just fine.

"Have you ever heard of Dan Tian?" he asks, his hand now resting a few inches below her bellybutton.

Korra narrows her eyes, searching hard for the tedious chi-points Katara has taught her. "Wait, just give me a second, I can get this—ha! It's a chi-point about two fingers behind the navel."

"Well, at least you're right about half of it," he says. "It's not just one point, but rather a complex assembly of chi-points. And right now I'm not touching any of them—they locate deep in your core. What you said, two fingers behind the navel, is where Guan Yuan locates. In short, Dan Tian is where all the chi in your body is cultivated. The root of life, I'm sure you've heard."

"Not really. They don't teach you that in the compound. Just… general healer stuff, like which channel to unblock so you can ease the pain."

He shakes his head perceptibly. "I can't say I'm surprised, and judging by the way you breathe I suppose they had failed to do a thorough job of—"

"Hey!" protests Korra but then can't think of anything to say. "That's—I'm breathing fine! Master Zoru said—"

"Do you always feel tired after firebending? Sore and empty as if someone had pumped the air out of your body?"

"Well…" she falters, irritated because he's right.

"And you think it's normal because Master Zoru has told you that he felt the same way."

She purses her lips. "So? Every firebender does, it's a demanding art. Not that you'd understand."

"Firebending itself is not laborious, no more so than any other forms of bending. You feel drained because you've been drawing energy from the wrong source," he says, ignoring her pout. "Most people breathe through their chests, as you do, and yet by doing that you use at most one third of the lung capacity. Therefore the breaths are shallow and hasty. It is unfortunate, to say the least—so much wasted potential. The energy is limited, and there is only so much stored in one's body in a lifetime. The way you're breathing is consuming instead of recycling—not to mention restoring."

"So you're saying I can get better at firebending—and, live longer, just by breathing through Dan Tian?"

"Not through Dantian. From Dantian," corrects Noatak, adding some pressure to his palm. "And not just firebending. Now: keep relaxing, and focus your energy down here. Feel the cycle."

And yet the more pressure he puts on his hand the more tensed she gets. How can she relax when he's this close? It's been like this since yesterday: every time he touches a part of her, she feels somehow driven to back away and restyle that part to shape, without a specific idea of what the "ideal shape" should be. All her life the Avatar has been confident of her body, not just because of the compliments, but also because she knows how athletic she is compared to girls her age. But around him she's strained, her body and her mind.

Korra imagines it would be hard to top how uncomfortable this is. But he manages by stepping away and holding her from behind, one hand still on her belly, the other on her hip. Squirming, she adopts an anxious voice: "Sorry about your coat."

"Focus."

Korra clears her throat, her eyes fixed upon her own visible breath in the air. All she's been doing is breathing, and yet it feels more challenging than airbending.

"I can feel you pressing your chi down," he says. "Do not force it. Remember: the energy belongs there—you're simply returning something you have borrowed from your own body."

"Easy for you to say. You've been doing this the right way since what, ten years old?"

He chuckles, his breath tickling her neck. "Seven. But close enough."

Then he presses his upper body against her back. Korra hisses, "Whoa there, that's not what—"

"Follow my lead." This voice again. His heartbeat is indeed remarkably slower than hers, his chest barely heaving. The breathing itself strikes her as conceptual, deep and resonating just like his voice. At this distance she can actually tell the heat inside his body travelling in a steady circle. Stop holding in your stomach, she hears him say. Is she, though? Only when she breathes out again does she realize she's been doing exactly that. She's relaxing in such a tentative, shivery way. Is this how ordinary girls feel all the time? Girls who can't do eight somersaults in a row or win a man twice their size at arm-wrestling. Is this what it feels like to be normal, to be acutely and painfully aware of your stomach that is somehow never flat enough? Is he teaching her or judging her?

Apparently he has sensed her uneasiness intensifying again. "You're doing great," he says, and then, quieter: Stop fighting.

Now she wishes he hadn't said that last part. Her eyes shut, Korra swallows hard and clenches her fingers around the sides of Tonja's dress. OK, says an anthropomorphized voice that has settled in her heated abdomen. Yet somehow, out there where the breathing continues in the freezing air, her answer comes out to be a strange sound at the back of her throat. Does he know—in this closeness—about the electric whoosh that shoots through her body and rests in her belly when he says that? Korra fancies herself peaceful from the outside, pinpricks of sweats emerging on her forehead. Not physical my ass, she considers saying. But instead, she starts talking the kind of talk you employ to stave off the embarrassing physical desire. She speaks of his former Equalists, most of whom have chosen to join the reformed Task Force. He has not asked but she keeps gabbling, her belly warmer and warmer:

"… so basically there are three different branches. Of course the council's pretty pissed, not just because of the chi-blockers in the Task Force, mostly because I went over their head to Zuko two years ago, so now we answer directly and exclusively to the United Nation instead of the five benders in the City Hall. And, well, it's sort of an awkward situation: among the five of them only Tenzin is still talking to me, and I can tell he's not happy about it."

Translation: every strand of me feels weakened and the bones in my knees are melting. I was not fighting. I have stopped fighting long time ago. Why would you say something like that?

"I'm sorry to hear that," he replies thinly, taking his hands off her and backing away. "I'm sure you've made the right decisions."

"You think?" says Korra rapidly and turns to face him. "That's—I'm not being sarcastic, I'm actually asking."

"Does it matter what I think?"

"Guess not," says Korra, sucking her front teeth, feeling her legs again. "It's just… I've been trying so hard not to step on any toes, but apparently these days no matter what you do there always will be this, this opposing voice. Benders think I'm all about sucking up to non-benders and vice versa. I feel like I'm letting everyone down."

Already she can hear the transoceanic northern accent in her voice, dipped in salty water, touched by harsh wind. Shame. Just when she's finally done losing the southern one. Now they stand face-to-face, and Korra has stopped trying not to stare—what's the point of doing something impossible? He's also been examining her and, after she's done complaining, gives a flavorless smile. Korra follows his eyes with her own as they rove, waiting for him to respond in kind, something like what Mako has said, You need to stop trying to please everyone, or as Bolin would put it, Oh well, you tried, and that's what matters, right? Tenzin would probably say something about duty demanding sacrifice… So, in what comforting way, wonders Korra, would the former Equalists' leader say about this Avatar?

"Good start today. Keep practicing." He looks away. "We should go home now. They'll be worrying if we're late for dinner."

She blinks. Sighs. "Yeah, you're probably right."

They do not move.

There's a difficult pause, in which Korra winces inside and sees clearly she does not want to go back. Not yet. Wherever  _back_  is. Desire does not bother to make an appointment—it marches up her head and makes itself at home. She realizes in horror that her body is taking actions before her mind weighs up the consequences. She steps on his feet and kisses him. Full, burly, this kiss, as explicit as a kiss can be, is delivered neither from the past nor to the future. It's now and she feels known. This fascinates Korra for a second, as she grabs his hair and feels the lips against hers return the fever, that she can no longer gauge her own choice.

It feels a bit off at first—the adrenaline rush, you have to give it a few seconds. Only just aware of herself, Korra tugs at his hair and doesn't care if it hurts. As he draws back a little with a hiss, she presses on and catches the warm smell from inside his shirt. It lingers for a few seconds, before she realizes it can't be him. It must be this day—the sunlit dust in the barn; the frozen, spicy fragrance of firs set against the white backdrop of northern lands. It's simple, the leader of the Revolution doesn't remind you of a brisk summer afternoon. But scents do not lie, and this Noatak smells of Aipalovik. Is that why she's doing this? So she can also dip her toes in the possibility of another life?

If this is what  _involved_  means, wonders Korra as her heart sharply knocks against her chest, then you should have just stayed in the damn city. And yet, even as her mind is saying  _step out yourself and look_ , Korra cannot move. Taken out of its context, the kiss itself is too perfect: it carries a kind of fictional air that she wishes she could wallow in and stretch longer, like in those romantic novels Asami had lent her where two people would merge into the sunset after something like this. But all around her, things have come with consequences a novel doesn't have to deal with after the denouement. And when he breaks away, it is with a tiny sigh as if she's taken something away from him. She feels a bit victorious after all, her mind shutting out the possibility that it's been too long since someone touched him like this.

Noatak gazes over her head rested against his shoulder, patient because by her bunched fists he can tell how embarrassed she is. He gives in to the silence, one hand in her hair, his feet in a dull ache—she's still stepping on him still. He doesn't move. The sun too stays still for them. And finally, with her hair slipping out of his fingers, her eyes downcast, Korra takes a step back, walks away. He follows until she gets confused at a crossroads. As he walks up, she glances away with eyes that have seen recent tears. Despite opting for a life of deception, Noatak has not yet lost all poetry. He finds himself somewhat saddened by moments like this the way that one is  _supposed_  to be saddened. So he traces the salt path of a tear with his thumb, leans down, and brushes a small kiss on her upper lip like a late footnote.

She closes her eyes but doesn't kiss back.


	2. On Memories and Being Just

Tarrlok rarely misses his bending. But in times like this—sitting on the porch, hunched over a cup of cold tea, a blanket on his lap—he wishes he could still freeze snow into ice so he can shoot it at something. An hour ago, he and Tonja came back to an empty house. Plonking the bags of groceries on the kitchen floor, he marched straight to the porch and has been waiting since then.

Relentless foot tapping, he's told, is a sign of poor manners. His throat is still dry from the argument last night—it was the kind of fight that starts with one thing and breaks into inexhaustible pieces. Every gripe and conflicting belief, every detail of uninvited yet carefully categorized memories:

The explosion that had acquired a dazzling beauty: white light, feeling terrified in the air yet somewhat liberated under water. The first couple of things he woke up to after three days of coma: a broad jaw and icy eyes, seen with double vision and an omnipresent pain. A searing resentment that had struck Tarrlok himself as perversely ungrateful. According to Noatak, he owes his life to a rare, ancient skill known as demolishing reconstruction, mastered only by healers extraordinaire. Which is to say, before Tarrlok came to he had been dead for a good while. Which is to say, in less than an hour Noatak had to actually kill him first in order to put the broken bones back in place, fix all the internal injuries, all the while making sure his blood was running warm, his heart pumping. Tarrlok didn’t ask about the details. In fact he didn’t speak to Noatak the whole time they were on that island. Until this day he still refuses to believe this healing method that only exists in stories. It sounds like something only a lunatic would do, although the technique itself is founded upon an irrefutable principle: you can’t kill a dead man.

Solid point. Is that really the case, though? This was also brought up last night, in suppressed voices so they wouldn’t wake up Korra, Tonja and the baby.  _Why would I lie about something like that?_  Noatak had hissed.  _How many times have I told you—I couldn’t find the rest of your arm! And if you could just let me finish the job and heal your f–_

Tarrlok has never let him finish that sentence. Last night was no exception. They kept on going, veering off from realms of the past and sliding back to the present: … _and what? So she can go back and bring back an entire army_ after _she learns how to deal with bloodbending?—_ here Tarrlok thumped his chest with his good hand— _I thought you were the smart one!_

And it was Noatak’s turn to play dumb. He’s no fool, Tarrlok. In the past three years he’s always had an inkling that Noatak has been expecting something: he’s shown no interest in having a family or moving out of the old house; been switching jobs every two months. No anger, no sign of defeat. As if the world had simply stopped happening for him. Sometimes Tarrlok wonders if Noatak is staying here out of guilt. But how do you even begin to mention something like this? Hey, brother, are you only living in the house of haunted crap because you’re afraid that I’ll “put on a glove” again? By the way, are you ever going to give me my bending back?

It was the same last night. Ever since their childhood: always this invisible, colossal wall, cutting through conversations with meaningless substitutes for what they really want to say. And when you divide history into infinite parts as they did, you’ll find yourself stuck in a perpetual time loop, just as they got nowhere on the vital points: how to deal with Korra, how to keep the whole thing away from Tonja. And by the time she got woken up by a wailing Tullik, it was already eight in the morning. The last thing he whispered to Noatak before they left for the market was:  _I know my opinion’s not the fucking word of saints, but it still counts. Don’t take her anywhere until I come back—once you cross the line that’s the fucking end to it._

Apparently there’s no line and no fucking end to it. Alone on the porch and in a slight vibration, Tarrlok grips tightly the blanket that Tonja, perplexed by this smoldering rage, has brought out for him. Things have been adding up in front of his eyes—it’s  _Korra_. His brother has been waiting for the Avatar. Why he’s been so sure she’d come that he’s practically done nothing in three years Tarrlok cannot penetrate. He only knows that right now he feels the old Tarrloky impulse to cause blunt hurt with deftly crafted words. In the past hour he’s worked up a collection of witty opening lines for the upcoming conversation. And yet, when they emerge at the end of the street—silent and with a distance just close enough to suggest earlier intimacy—Tarrlok combusts. Abandoning sarcasm, he leaps to his feet.

"Been out?" he bellows and begins striding, the blanket still in his hand. Korra comes to a halt as Noatak keeps walking. Tarrlok marches right past him, shoulders clashing. " _You_!” He stares at Korra. “Where have you been?”

Returning, Noatak puts a hand on him. “Easy, now. We just went for—”

"Am I talking to you?" He bats off that hand, his eyes still acutely fixed on the girl, who is looking at Noatak sheepishly. Tarrlok presses on in the face of her wincing, "Had a nice afternoon? Enjoyed our humble village?"

"We went for a walk," she repeats. Almost inaudible. This is not the Avatar Tarrlok had known. For all her prowess and chutzpah, the one quality she’s oozing now is vulnerability. Wrapped in a big cloak she seems to be an assembly of breakable parts in front of a crushing confrontation. A flare of guilt passes, but before he can utter another word, Noatak steps in between them and looks at him in such a way that he feels compelled to step back.

"Don’t, make, a scene." He speaks quietly from the corner of his lips, smiling at something behind Tarrlok: a confused neighbor walking past their house. Tarrlok nods politely, turns back fuming.

"Shall we?" says Noatak gesturing at the house.

"No we shan’t," articulates Tarrlok. "For once we’re gonna talk this out. Here.  _Now_.”

"Haven’t we done enough of that for one day?" says Noatak, gazing over Tarrlok idly. "At least we can wait after dinner. She hasn’t been eating since last night."

"Oh. _Ooh_! And whose fault was  _that_?” Tarrlok leans aside so he can address Korra hiding behind. “Are we—are we on strike now? Is that what’s happening?”

She looks slightly repelled. “Watch it, pal. You sure you wanna stand between me and food?”

Tarrlok looks at her. Looks at Noatak. Looks at her.

"I don’t know  _what_  this is”—he sticks out a finger, slowly enclosing two faces in one circle—”and honestly, I don’t care. But I do have a  _life_  here, Avatar, and a family, unlike a certain someone else…”

“ _Unnn_ clench,” says Korra over him. “Ten days and I’m out of your  _life_ "—air quote with a grimace—"so you can go to your stupid carnival with your cute-ass  _family_. Don’t talk like I’m dying to stay here.”

"You’d think so, wouldn’t you?" Tarrlok shifts back to Noatak staring at his own feet. "Is that what he’d promised you? That’s just  _adorable_ …”

"Gah—you know what?" Korra shoves Noatak away, and comes close to Tarrlok’s face with a look similar to what he’d once seen from behind the desk. "I’m gonna rip all this bullshit innuendo out of your throat and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be able to feel the stupidity in you whole system! I come and go whenever and  _wherever_  I want. And if you can’t deal with it then the least you could do is stop blaming everything on your brother!”

This is said with shut eyes and elaborate gestures as if she’s trying to convince a bigger audience. Tarrlok shakes his head at Noatak, a lilt in his voice. “I see you’ve still got it. One day—that’s  _got_  to be some kind of record.”

With a burning fist Korra lunges at him. This, the kind of move obviously for show, hangs in the air awaiting its intervention. Noatak obliges on cue, catching her arm and throwing himself between them again. But it’s not the outburst that strikes Tarrlok a step back—it’s her fire, light yellow with a greenish hue, hissing ghastly as if alive.

"What  _was_  that?” Tarrlok stares at her now quenched fist and then at his brother. “Did y—did you see it?” And then his eyes widen. “I knew it! I  _knew_  I wasn’t hallucinating that night in my office—your fire  _is_  different!”

Her wrist still in Noatak’s grasp, the Avatar thrusts him a finger. “You bet your ass it is! Keep talking to me like that, next time it’s gonna be all over your _face_ —” At the actual sight of Tarrlok she stops abruptly. He sees regret paint in wild strokes all over her. “That’s—I didn’t—”

Finality interferes.

"All right, enough with the drama. You," says Noatak and brings her hand down with a gentle tug, "go back inside, ask Tonja to rustle up something for you to eat. Just—don’t spoil your appetite for dinner, okay?"

Of all the things he’s been hearing so far, including Korra’s threat, this softly voiced settle somehow strikes Tarrlok as the most offensive. He holds the blanket to his chest so he can’t throw a punch.

“ _So_ "—once she’s in the house, Noatak turns back with a different face—"that fell apart quickly." Tarrlok opens his mouth but only manages to insert a murmur. "Are you proud of yourself?"

"Frankly," says Tarrlok matching his tone, "a little bit. Now, if we’re done with the nonsense—what’s the deal here?"

"What deal?"

Swaying like a drunk sailor, Tarrlok sighs. “I’m so sick of talking in circles. She’s already gone—the  _deal_ , Noatak! What do  _you_  want out of this?”

With spread arms Noatak displays integrity. “I honestly just want to teach her.”

"Fine… keep it all to yourself." He laughs desperately, walks away. "I’m  _done_ , utterly, thoroughly, unconditionally—”

"And  _yet_ —” Noatak raises a finger.

Tarrlok spins around, brandishing the blanket. “Of course I’m not done—exactly how blind do you think I am? Ten days later that girl’s proposing to you!”

"That’d be awfully flattering. Unconventional. But flattering."

"Is that what this is all about? You’ve been waiting for her as in… waiting for  _her_.”

"It depends. Does it make you feel easier to think I do everything with an unspeakable motive?" asks Noatak picking his nails. "Well, then, you caught me: I am head over heels in love with the Avatar."

"Keep joking." Tarrlok closes his eyes for a beat. "I have to say, the plot is getting a little unoriginal. Also the whole ‘oh no he’s my enemy what do I do’ theme, it’s sub-theatre: a few days later she’s starting to feel as if someone has grabbed her hair, stuck rolls of firecrackers in her ears and blown two bleeding holes in that little head of hers, and then she’s thinking the world presents itself clear for the first time, that she herself and her old friends have been nothing but little teenage shits while the larger community is being suppressed, oppressed and every kind of pressed by some totalitarian bending scum and it’s your job— _yours_ , a  _blood_ bender’s job to help her fix it! You seriously expect me not to see where it goes? I used to be in the same business and you’re not the only one good at it—now look where it got us!”

Mid-speech Noatak begins to pinch his nose, his shoulders rolling, and by the time Tarrlok finishes, he seems to be struggling between noise and tears. He makes his choice: it’s the kind of laugh that breaks into several parts, each one with a different pitch. He makes an effort to apologize by shaking his head, but then bends over into a nasty relapse. He seems to be adopting a different face; everything screams glee expect for his eyes, as if he’s been bullied into this hilarity. Tarrlok waits with his arms folded and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to stop this. Partly because he’s tired, partly because he’s forty, but mostly because he too has heard himself.

It goes on for a while. Now Noatak is coughing, holding both sleeves to his eyes as a much younger man would.

"Done?"

"Yes, yes… oh—really, nothing funny about what you said," says Noatak wiping his eyes, "but the way you said it… makes me think of how we used to say these simple things but with different words as though refinement was the solution that could help get us further… oh"—he smiles in the same way a kid does when given red wine—"sorry. I’m sorry. You were right: it’s quite liberating, speaking like this. And I honestly don’t know how to talk you out of these doubts—they are reasonable as they were beautifully uttered."

"I only said them because I have two eyes and two ears," says Tarrlok. "It’s hardly deduction. I wish I were being paranoid over these things; I wish for once you’re being kind just because you are kind. But that’s what you do, Noa: you simmer and pour these thoughts in people’s skulls… and for someone who couldn’t even go through his fifteenth birthday without divulging—"

"Still hanging on to that theory, aren’t we?"

"Okay…" Sighing, Tarrlok adjusts his wooden fingers. "That on the back burner—suppose it was all just the spirits’ stab at some black comedy… The fact is I’d do the same if I were you—about the Avatar. And believe it or not, I know what it is to seek; I know that dryness—it must have been difficult for you to live with this persistent thirst while I’ve been moving on."

His brother looks peacefully engrossed.

"I’d ask what happened between you and that girl," continues Tarrlok, "today  _and_  three years ago—but then you’ll just banter your way out of it.” He gazes out the front yard. “I’ve always thought  _I_  was the one neck-high in the same old quagmire. As it turns out I’m not the most attached after all. So go ahead, charm the belt off that girl’s pants, have her have you  _teach_  her—run off into the sunset, for all I care. But just so we’re clear”—he looks back at Noatak without blinking—”I have a good life now, Noa, where the biggest trauma lies in re-carpeting and faucet-fixing instead of the epic battle of what we used to be and what we should be. Perhaps this  _is_  an insignificant life, to people who don’t know what it means to finally have someone waiting for you at home. But I hang on to it—fucking cherish it. So if you try anything,  _anything_ , that would put  _my_  wife and child in any kind of danger—”

"Whoa!" interrupts Noatak throwing his hands in the air, looking appalled. "Wait a second—and let’s skip the part where you call me homeless—am I really such a monster to you?"

"I didn’t call you ho—that’s not what I…" Tarrlok scratches his jaw, moderating his tone a bit. "I’m just saying: if you weren’t so damn secretive about everything…"

A pause. “Would it make you feel better,” says Noatak slowly, “if you come with us to the barn—”

He shrinks.

"—so you can see for yourself that what we’re doing is strictly  _training_ ,” adds Noatak, “that I have absolutely no agenda. Get your head out of the gutter.”

"I don’t know. It’s not really my part to… and I don’t think Tonja would—"

A whipping sound follows.

"Really?" Tarrlok raises a brow.

"Sorry, it was right there. Hey, I’m only offering an earnest proposal because clearly my own brother doesn’t trust me. It’s  _your_  decision.”

"Still… I’m not quite on good terms with that birdish little thing. She’s  _that_  age—the idea of ideology means more to her than the ideology itself.”

"She’s more sophisticated than people give her credit for."

"Meaning?"

"She’s precise but doesn’t know it. I find us thinking alike at times."

"Marvelous, go say that to her and see what happens… How long do you think it’ll take before she gets sucked into your cult-classic radicalism crap? Not that I give a damn… It’s just not my world anymore."

"My cult-clas—"Noatak scoffs, dangerously brushing past another fit. "Oh you  _are_  funny. Look, I’m not getting into  _this_  again, but you can’t deny how rare her talent is—I’ve never seen someone learn this fast; even I couldn’t get the gist of Dan Tian breathing in an hour—”

"That’s what you two did today?"

"Yes," says Noatak impatiently, "but there’s also something deeply wrong with her—"

"Wasn’t that something  _you_?”

"Stop, cutting me, off," he says. "Now: if she doesn’t learn how to control this power soon, it could be a threat to all, including the people you do give a damn about."

This silences Tarrlok for a while. “No shit she’s dangerous,” he muses. “At least three years ago she was just cocky, which in a weird way sort of matched her ego. But now with  _that_  kind of insecurity? I’m surprised she hasn’t blown up yet.”

"That’s why earlier you shouldn’t have addressed her so harshly. Powerful people respond to power, Tarrlok, not force—you should know the difference by now," says Noatak stately. "And as far as I’m concerned, we can trust her to keep our whereabouts to herself—it seems to me that you’ve forgotten who had freed us in the first place."

Still dubious, Tarrlok gives a reluctant grunt. “So, all in all, you’re helping her because you actually care? Why didn’t you just say so last night?”

"That’s because I don’t," he says at once, looking away from the house. "Couldn’t care less. What  _you_  said: it’s just nice to have a reason to get out of bed.”

At this Tarrlok subsides. Noatak gives him a punch on the arm. “Think it over, would you? No hurry.”

He hums, turns to leave.

"And uh—Tarrlok?"

He turns back to his brother standing there in all that broad-shouldered, black-tunicked glory. “In extremely rare cases,” says Noatak, “the color of the flame can be influenced by the mental state of the firebender. The more unstable, the colder the color.”

“ _Huh_ … what kind of mental state?”

"Could be anything—the level of instability, or an unanalyzable constant such as the aptitude itself. It’s a bit more complex than merely an equation. A mutation, if you like."

"And if that’s the case, the colder the color—"

"The more fatal, yes."

"You said  _mutation_ , but isn’t it permanent in some cases? Hey, remember that neighbor that used to come to our old igloo at night? Haliq… Kaliq?”

"Very close. Akluitok."

"Sure, you freak… Remember when he used to tell those spooky stories of blue fire?"

"Not as vividly as you do, I’m sure. You’ve always been spellbound by the tale of Princess Azula."

"But then you grow up. I know how much  _you_  hated them, though.”

"How very prejudiced of me. But then you grow up."

"And you know this now because…"

A long pause. Noatak rubs his temple, either retrieving or repelling something.

"Should I say I’m simply a man of the world?"

"Charming." Tarrlok walks away.

"It’s—" Turning back, he watches Noatak’s face pass rapidly through a cringe into humorous regret. "Not important. Second-order conviction, brother. You know how it is."

"Right." Tarrlok squints. "Except I don’t. I guess some of us aren’t blessed with that extra layer that makes our aura so tragically ravishing."

"Please stop."

"There is no such thing as second-order conviction. Ambition is ambition, Noa. Nothing to be ashamed of."

"I’m only ashamed that I’m not ashamed of it. Will it make me less of a person to you?"

"Don’t worry, you’re not that important." He turns to leave, turns back once more. "Noa."

"Mmm?"

"Clearly you’ve made your choice, so what I’m about to say won’t make a dent whatsoever," says Tarrlok, "but I wish you could somehow step out and see the way you look at that girl. So at least you’ll try to stop lying to yourself."

"Mmm."

"One last thing: obviously you’re being your fifteen-year-old self again, which means—"

"A purist unpurified."

"—a purist unpurified. So, no judging, but a fair tip: just because there are more reasons to sin, doesn’t make the sin smaller."

"Duly noted." A pause. "And by implications I’m to assume that you won’t come with us tomorrow?"

"Oh I’m coming all right."

"Beautiful. And. Since we’re warning now, I too feel obligated to mention that if I were you," says Noatak grinning, "I  _really_  wouldn’t talk to her like that again.”

How many moves, figures Korra as Noatak brings down her hand—that is, if this were a sophisticated game like Pai Sho—how many moves to get from where I am to  _not_   _being_   _wrong_? She makes a show of walking away. But a few steps past the clean sheets and clothes hanging in the yard, reality catches up and presses on her shoulders, so does the horrendous possibility that she has been, as explicitly accused, a puppet.

Stopping on the porch with a shaking hand, Korra breathes deeply. Twenty seconds later, Sinaaq from RepublicCity is in the kitchen. There had been a brief thought of telling Tonja the truth, but when she turns to Korra and asks if she could help check on Tullik, anger vanishes. Korra stares at Tullik sitting in his crib, with his watery eyes and chubby arms—all of a sudden she can see where Tarrlok’s jittery nerves have come from.

And he stares right back. Babies, they blink less.

Korra sits on the couch with a loud rumble from her stomach. She wonders what she looks like in the eyes of Tullik, who cannot yet pronounce the word Avatar. Before Korra came to the City she’d been told that the Avatars were guardians watching over their people. But in fact she’s never felt herself “gazing down from high above”. If anything, it’s been more like walking under deep, silent water, while people move above her head, living. No one can hear you.

Almost unwittingly, Korra reaches a finger to Tullik. His fingers are so tiny he uses both hands just to fully grab it. It seems a bit rude sitting here while Tonja does all the cooking, but Tullik wouldn’t let go of her. Groaning, Korra picks him up and, in fear of her clumsiness, holds him with both arms.

It turns out to be a mistake, going back into the kitchen, because when Tonja asks what Aluk has been angry about all afternoon, she can’t come up with anything that would make sense. Exhausting the terms like “family stuff”, Korra makes a desperate move by asking Tonja how she and Aluk met each other, and is then surprised that she doesn’t hate what comes next—a bland, short story, very un-councilman. As Tonja speaks, Korra tries her best to seek a refracted image of a devoted, protective father.  _So, in this face, his new life?_  She fails to see a changed Tarrlok, but by looking at her, Korra is untimely reminded of her own mother. It’s one of those executive observations from her gut: the breeze of immediate safety from certain people.

"So I guess you can say I ended up with a man who doesn’t need me to shrink into his hand." This is how she ends the telling—the last thing Korra needs to hear after an afternoon like this. Bent on not being a crybaby for the rest of the day, she looks away. Too late. Tonja, story finished, turns back to a watery eyed young lady. She’s experienced at detecting wounds, and in this twenty-year-old she sees pain at once—the theatrical kind that places itself on every girl this age. Tonja smiles thinly at this and starts rubbing salt evenly into a fish. She’s no stranger to this look. Ten years ago she was in the exact same place. And yet, there is also something else about this girl. Something so colossal it feels like an actual journey beyond her possible years. Tonja can’t put her finger on it, but at the sight of Sinaaq holding the baby so tight like some kind of end’s drawing nigh, she just has to brush the girl’s nose with a wet knuckle and ask, "Whacha thinkin’?"

"Nothing," says Korra with a feline flinch. "Just a little light-headed. Low blood sugar and all."

"Here." Tonja stuffs a piece of zucchini bread in her mouth without asking. Korra makes a faint protest but then widen her eyes.

"Dis is sho good!"

"I know," says Tonja without looking flattered. "So: boy trouble?"

Going over this later, Korra can’t really account for her reaction. Maybe it’s exactly the frankness of this question that has impelled her to spill to a woman she barely knows.

"How can you tell," begins Korra, uneasy, "if you’re being… used, by someone you can’t really trust?"

"Ah—so it  _is_  boy trouble. I was just taking a wild guess.”

Recalling their fake kinship, Korra winces as if in physical pain. “Not exactly… a boy.”

"Oh no," says Tonja, swirling a spoon through the soup. "Girl trouble?"

Korra tries to smile.

"Nah. It’s not—it’s got nothing to do with relationship."

Tonja raises a brow and Korra regrets having opened her mouth, but equally it doesn’t seem right to stop now.

"Fine… let’s say it’s boy trouble," says softened Korra with brash voice. "Doesn’t matter. How can you tell, then?"

"You can’t." Tonja shrugs and tips her head back. "Oh, wait a second… Yeah, you can’t."

Honesty is a strange place to be in, but for Korra, being able to talk like this certainly sits in the pros column of life. How is Tonja pulling this off, though?

"You’re kind of awesome, you know?" says Korra and watches Tullik spit out a little bubble. "It’s like you’re in a whole different ball game."

"First of all," says Tonja severely, "I am  _extremely_  awesome” —both chuckle— “but it’s really a prize at the end line, only happens after you’re forced out of the beauty game.”

"You’re still very pretty. I didn’t—I mean yes, you’re beautiful and all but that’s not what I’m—I don’t really know how to… ugh." Korra wonders at herself: why does honesty sounds so dumb when it’s her?

But Tonja takes this incoherent compliment gladly and gracefully. “Thank you. I think I get what you’re trying to say—you’re not looking at me. You’re looking at the people I’ve been  _through_ … I know, I know, you city kids are all about—what’s it called now? Free female consciousness?” Korra groans. “When I was your age I thought I hated everyone,” continues Tonja, “but really I was just pissed at myself for being pissed. And the fact is later you get to walk through real people, boys, mothers, kids, what have you… and, they sort of happen  _in_ you. So I guess my point here is that you meet yourself in them also, and one day you just feel—I don’t know, heavier, even if you’ve already walked out of them.”

"I see," tries Korra, up floating something Katara has said. "A shelter, then, in each other?"

"Nice." Tonja nudges her on the arm. "Matter of what you want to give and whether you want to be given, is all it is. Drink the tea, drink the sea… Get a boy, get a girl… just get going!"

"But I think… it’s such hard work," falters Korra, "to walk through them and  _give_  out of the part of yourself that actually  _can_  give, instead of the part that just wants to be given—I don’t think I have the heart for that. How could you feel heavier, if you can’t even find that line in yourself?”

This conversation, albeit short, is the most surreal thing ever happened in this kitchen. They fall into a brief silence, in which Korra buries her nose in Tullik’s neck and takes in his bready baby smell. Tonja stares at her for a few seconds. So the kid has wit—good-hearted wit, not the defensive sharpness she displayed at the dinner table last night.

"Precise kid," says Tonja practically to herself.

She doesn’t see that the words have already plunged Korra headlong into the wet, soft earth of memory. Now, just as one must go back to Fire Lord Ozai’s “teaching method” in order to comprehend Fire Lord Zuko’s odd aversion for plastic surgery, so the night on Memorial Island is essential to the understanding of why Korra has been drawn all the way from Republic City to this very kitchen in Aipalovik. For there had been  _Amon and the Avatar_  for one night before there is  _Korra and Noatak_  in front of a barn, where a child with cold intellect had wept and practiced in secret until he fully mastered something called demolishing reconstruction all by himself—so fuck  _you_ , Tarrlok, and—

we must now rewind a little, to the night before Shuang Jiang, three years ago, for there had been plenty of  _involvement_  also. In short, Amon had stepped on a nerve by showing up alone to her challenge, paralyzing her with two jabs, and—here the loop was drawn—trying to scare her some more with moves that seemed horrendous to Korra and necessary to himself. That night things happened in third-person, past tense. Caught between her panic (People had been good to her, weak for her, not anymore.); his absentmindedness (Which is more fundamental to human condition? Instincts, roots, or convictions?); and a mutual astonishment (Why is her fire blue in shock?). Eventually Korra bit him on the neck—so, to answer his earlier wonder:  _instinct_  came first in this particular case. For Korra, it was only natural to respond power in the only language she knew how to speak: physicality. For Amon, this time he had failed to ignore the abominable heat in his trousers. At what seemed returned and smoldering passion, Korra felt a bit victorious after all, her mind shutting out the simple possibility that it’d been too long since someone had touched him like that—a touch of years of pent-up sexual energy to both involved. It wasn’t long before their lips got involved, and involved were the other body parts—hard to go further than that, at least for one night.

It was over as quickly as it had begun. Because Tarrlok, so very Tarrlokishly we now know, had decided to borrow an airship from Bei Fong and search the island. Even though no one found out about what happened, the two involved spent the next few days in horror, for different reasons but with the same coping method, a fondest in all history: denial. The week after Shuang Jiang passed peacefully.  _Can the clear mind clear everything out_? Korra answered herself by gluing to the tried and tested formula: training. Hair every which way. Clothes dripping. Water and earth and fire in turn. The Avatar doesn’t do regret. Fury is so much easier.

Tough business. Meanwhile, as Amon saw it, some of us have the time to cringe at insignificant fuck-ups, while some of us have serious plans to make, a night to forget, and a stadium to blow up.  _What is pure will always be pure_ , he kept reciting what he’d jotted down ten years ago—the last sentence of his first speech, words he’d believed could protect him and his Equalists, fundamentally, unwaveringly and eventually, from people like that girl…

And yet over the ensuing month, something inexplicable began happening to both in denial, the sequela of removing a memory forcefully and with terrible skills. It left little pieces in them—not in their minds, but  _from_ and purely _of_ the bodies. And by the time they realized it, these details—remnants of scents, moans and touches in the velveteen darkness—leavened by memories, worsened by restraint, were already impossible to purge out of their systems.

It grew wilder as they kept discovering more and more of each other on themselves, until the physical necessity became too acute to bear. Just like that the deal was off. The next two weeks, during the tournament, were the moistest, stickiest and busiest fourteen days of their lives. One was touching himself with the kind of frequency and devotion that could easily put his seventeen-year-old self to shame. And the other, well, had no such problem. Things weren’t things but triggers now: every piece of information on the radio and in the newspapers, every tiniest voice detected in paranoia, on the street, during training, at strategy meetings… It became science for him—fleshly, riotous science—searching and calculating from his memory the rigidity of her nipples that had fitted so properly in his mouth; cold marble floor against intense warmth and yielding curves; the fullness of her lower lip and the wetness of the upper, joined in a silky pout, demanding instead of asking to be tasted. So… yes, he’d just do that.  _Apparently that’s just who I am now_. A kisser, to whom every set of lips I’ve ever kissed was only for practice so I can kiss you in a point-making kind of way. And yes, at this moment, I maintain the brutal awareness of the world external to those lips—I just don’t want to be part of it anymore.

 

________________________________________

 

Soon, Amon realized that he wasn’t in the game of being forgiven, that his own conviction was revenging on him, throwing shame at him. Such shame! He felt taunted—indeed you end up becoming yourself. Whereas Korra, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, would find herself knee-deep in a game called Which Alternative Universe. The rule was simple: pick one; enter it; perform the Ritual of Solace; exit it covered in sweat and guilt.

Sex, at least the idea of it, had long been a problem for her. But never in these universes.  _Good morning, citizens of Republic City… It’s time for this city to stop worshiping bending athletes as if they were heroes…_  This penetrated Korra’s thick training uniform, sent her imagination way back into her bedroom in the White Lotus Compound, where in a filmy vision she found herself dressed in the kind of underwear she had accidentally seen in a magazine under Bolin’s bed, as she was spotted by a predatory-stepped figure who was taking off his mask slowly and then demanding her to close her eyes,  _again_. He smelled like… his voice. Korra, lacking a name for this synaesthetic feeling, was at a nonplus. But in these scenarios, he always  _knew_  what he was doing. And this time he was rough— _rougher_ —and she fluttering-lidded. He was talking, his voice slightly muffled by the mask, the orders terse, the spasms of hurt mellifluous. It was so very wrong and lurid, the actual  _vision_  of being told what to do and letting herself do it (!).  _On my knees. Bite your shoulder. Harder. Harder. Harder._

She could feel the bleak humor in the gap between her intentions and actions. And now she heard herself speaking in City Hall. She remembered being angry about something. It all seemed hazy.

So, it would appear that a clear mind couldn’t clear everything out, and what is pure wouldn’t always be pure, after all.  _I’m going after Amon!_  It was in this unclearness that Korra pursued him in a waterspout, with Mako yelling something she couldn’t hear. And it was in this impurity that Amon found himself waterbending for the first time in years. Stay away, further, back, out, out, out! And then:  _You four retrieve the Avatar; do not underestimate her_. Do not do not do not oh thank spirits you did. He gave chase, melodramatic, absentminded. He simply could not follow into the woods.

But despite the intensity of the desire unspeakable, Amon did well following his plan. It’d been two days since they set foot on the Air Temple Island, and he’d already found her bedroom about the only place he could bear to be now. He couldn’t bring himself to step out, lest he should be seen in such a state. Where his subordinates held their tongues and thought the whole bedroom-occupying situation might be some kind of eccentric power statement, Amon could be found working twenty hours a day, just so he couldn’t find the time to rifle through her things like an obsessed, pimple-headed boy. The irony of him voluntarily squatting in a girl’s bedroom did not enter his mind. Instead, something in the ritual of it—going through his speech over and over, imagining hunting her down and taking her bending away in front of the entire city after the Equalist government was established—hugely calmed him.

The second night on the island, they told him the councilman had woken up. 2 a.m., 15 November 170ASC, the brothers were mask-to-face for the first time since their final split eighteen years ago. Tarrlok didn’t look surprised after Amon wiped off the make-up with his bare hand. He looked at Noatak for a good five minutes. He said, very slowly:

"Go fuck yourself."

Amon pulled over a chair and sat on it backwards—he thought of his fifteenth birthday dinner, where the idea of running away to Republic City had struck him for the first time while he was sitting in this exact same position, next to the exact same person. He then tried, in hoarse voice, to explain that what he’d been doing was a great project, higher than himself, higher than Tarrlok.  _It is not my place to start or stop this_ , he said.  _I have only been helping where I can, with what I have, to correct the creators’ mistakes_.  _It is quite clear what an abomination I am to you at this moment, but the simple fact, brother, is that things are getting out of hand.…_

 _Please_ , Amon had said.  _I need your help_.

This time Tarrlok didn’t hesitate. “Go fuck yourself.”

All right, then. Leaving him alone in the attic, Amon sat down on Korra’s bed and tried to convert the wrath—at everyone, not least of all himself—into words:

_You people live an orgy of deception, head-first, entering this filthy pit with the substantial equivalent of power, automatically filed under The Gifted; upon adulthood, gracing the unfortunate lot with magnificence, purpose destined, each and every step paved beforehand. You walk this. You keep walking, until reaching the edge of a precipice. Then you peer over, glimpsing at a city that has been catching all kinds of disease for the last two decades: the delusion of peace created by Fire Lord Zuko and Avatar Aang a fundamental source of infection, politicians its jovial carriers building castles in the air. Blind, or rather, blinded. They couldn’t see because they do not wish to, also because there is no need for them to see. Not yet! They would most certainly be the last to know. The real war, the one where a dramatic U-turn had been steered by modern technology, the one where cruel decisions are being made, the one with living and breathing calculations of detonation, casualty and strategy, goes on miles above your lobotomized little head. …_

It went on and on. And, going through it later, he found the awfulness of the “speech” inexplicable—who was he even trying to convince? With high-level Dan Tian breathing, he adopted a calm face, his stomach enjoying an inverse love affair with shame and hormone, taking what little pleasure he could from the fact that the Avatar did appear terrified before she ran into the woods. She was just afraid, wasn’t she? Had there been a moment, then?—

—she must have used her eyes, the color of which he could no longer tell.  _They are blue. Blue is not a color_. With clenched fists in his hair, Amon recalled a river cutting through the village, thawed only during that brief window between late July and early August. That river leads to an ocean; the ocean is a color; the color is her eyes. Outside the doors of this bedroom he was a leader that despised power, a clueless big brother. But inside here, burying his face in her pillow, he felt like Noatak from Aipalovik.

 

________________________________________

 

Imagine you had met a man, to whom you’d lost your virginity out of not affection or rebellion, but sheer panic; whose face you’d never seen but who had smelled like his voice, talked the way he walked, and moved in absoluteness; whose touches had been harsh and continuous and whose lips had tasted like a dark Tuesday morning when everyone is asleep and you’re the only one up for training just because how alive firebending makes you feel; to which sensations you had in the following weeks touched yourself in all possible ways a seventeen-year-old could think of; a man whose belief, rooted against everything you’d ever been taught, had slowly crept up your veins to the back of your retinas and imposed an odd hue on the things you saw—a feeling you’d never tell your friends because it’d be much easier for them to believe that you were the same girl who could be beaten but never defeated nor compromised; because how could you explain that strangely pleasurable twinge of un-selfing, and the fact that you had allowed words like _whatever road presents itself, we shall take, for True Equality is neither a myth among_   _the proletariat nor a Subject of Passion; for it is pseudo multiplicity that has been the veil of deeply corrupted governments; for bending is not a gift from the spirits but an impurity that can and will be cleansed…_  nonsense like this, to actually wander in the backrooms of your head, and that even if they still made no horse sense, you somehow found the idea of questioning not unendurable: what if bending had indeed got in the way of things like medical and military development?—but still, a guy whose words you knew, in your gut of guts, should never be trusted, because one day you found that when Bolin and Mako argued that being a bender was not a label of guilt but an identity of nature, you had not offered the usual assent by nodding vigorously, but had instead looked at Asami to see if she was offended—anyway, imagine a man like this all of a sudden turned out to be a bloodbender, sharing the same heritage of which you’d been so proud, coming from the same tribe whose chief was your own uncle—a man like this was now holding the only airbenders left in custody, a mentor on whose shoulder you’d cried, three kids upon whose smiles you’d secretly planted your own nebulous idea of parenthood, a woman who was not your mother but to whom you’d once mentioned those embarrassing dreams and received no judgment whatsoever, imagine all this, and you’d probably have the vaguest idea as to how Avatar Korra had felt when she saw Amon—with whom all the aforementioned things had indeed occurred—stand on that stage, tell the same fake story of his fake scars with his fake passion to a very real, very enchanted crowd.

 

________________________________________

 

They were running on the wall. Amon stayed where he was, gripping the sides of his pants.  _That_  was just plain stupid—so stupid he suspected for a second there was a next step awaiting him. There was something moronically courageous, and yet, so  _true_  it made him feel inferior, not because she could run on the wall and was now shooting fireballs, but simply because she wasn’t wearing a mask.

He told his people to stay back, and waited for a second. The feeling was peculiar: ashamed, excited, eased— _eased_! He breathed out, quivering as if he hadn’t exhaled in half an hour. And it finally became clear to him that she wasn’t the thing that had been holding his sanity to ransom—it’d been the secret itself, for eighteen years, weighting his heart with never knowing when the world built on a lie would suddenly topple.

Without wanting to, I’ve established myself a god in front of a god. And there can only be one of us standing.

Amon waited some more, idly dodging Mako’s attack, watching her free the airbenders one by one, and once again, sensing her heart thumping against her ribs. Why was he always waterbending whenever she was around? There was shouting off the stage—who would walk away from a fight like this?—but he heard nothing.

It was about time and it was time: she looked at him, this time he held those eyes. He was calm now, and truly still. The world waited as Korra turned to Tenzin, who was quite close to exploding, and asked, “Where’s Pema?”

Amon heard himself answer, not knowing why, “They are in prison, both safe.”

"Was I talking to you, asshole?" She turned back but her eyes went straight over his shoulder, and then, "Guys, go find Pema and take them out of here. I’ve got this."

"Yeah… that’s  _not_  going to happen,” said Mako. But Korra brushed this right off. All her friends took her visible shaking as a reaction to Amon’s intention of ridding the world of airbending. They did not know the source of this excessive anger. Over the last month Avatar Korra had changed—a slow montage to some sort of gauzy, hypnotizing music even in her own head—her clothes had changed, her entire way of talking and seeing had changed all because of a liar, who now looked so together. So together! Her mind justly screwed loose, Korra couldn’t account for why she was suddenly in front of Amon, and—as was told to her later—grabbing the back of his neck, punching him full in the throat with the kind of strength that sent him in the actual air.

The sound of something tearing apart. Looking down, she saw in her hand half of his hood, a tuft of his hair, and the mask. People were hissing now, at again the sight of their leader’s burnt face, as well as the Avatar’s wry one. Those standing on the stage, Equalists or not, were utterly bemused by this last move, so slow for Amon, so clumsy for Korra—even an average fighter could have easily ducked that thump. So what  _was_  that?

Someone called her name. Korra turned back to Mako and Tenzin.

"Back off," she cracked. "This is my fight." The way she said "fight", as if it were a word blazing out a crater, compelled both of them a step back. Ikki was crying now. Korra shut her eyes. Dropped the mask. Stomped on it. It didn’t break dramatically as expected. She kicked it off the stage.

Another commotion, in which Amon slowly “picked himself up” (there is a reason these clichés of combat exist), coughing violently and clasping his hand around his throat as he did so. He shook his head like he’d just had four shots in a row, as if to say,  _Boy, that one kinda stung_. His voice, constricted by the punch, sounded comical—

"That’s the only one you get." Amon took a graceful step back, accepting a huge cheer, and inclined his head. "So."

"At least let the kids go."

Licking the exposed part of his teeth, Amon smiled.

"OK, then." Korra smiled. "Tell those idiots to stay back. Let’s go, you and me, pretty boy."

"My people won’t be a problem."

"Well actually they won’t  _be_  your people anymore after I’m done kicking your balls up in your fucking throat but what _ever_  shithead; you’re going down you hear me?  _Down!_ ”

She was bellowing slogans now. The swearing policy for Korra—at least when Tenzin was around—had always been strict: you don’t talk genitals in front of children, you just don’t. But to this the airbender gave acquiescence. Gathering the kids behind, Tenzin and Mako stepped aside. The winner-take-all deal was quite evident now. Amon touched his tucked upper lip, somehow very aware of its purposeful ugliness. He couldn’t recall whether he had put on make-up the night they were together, for he had only bothered to remember the important things: the way she had slid her hand back up his neck; the angle she had tilted her head so he could feel faintly her pulse against his lips—

—and that she had not opened her eyes once.

Amon said flatly, “Feel free to use your bending.”

"Fuck you!" Then she spun to the crowd. "And fuck you, too, morons! I’m so sick of this place! Nothing! Makes! Sense! And  _you_!” She whipped around, sticking a finger to his face. “Think you’re the only one who can pretend to be a non-bender? Listen up, assclown: either fight me with waterbending like a decent human being—hell, even bloodbending would make you less of a dick—or we can both be hypocrites and fight boring. Your pick,  _fuckwad_!”

"Korra," said Tenzin faintly.

More booing, but the world didn’t seem to exist for her anymore. With two bunched fists Korra thumped the sides of her legs. “ _Liar!_ ”

Then the world watched the Avatar squeeze her eyes shut and lend her lungs to that word five more times until her voice finally broke. The world watched the Avatar search for her breath in difficulty, minus her pride, with a now faraway look on her face. She did not cry.

Amon said flatly, “Feel free to use your bending.”

Despite the splitting headache, Korra heard the words loud and clear, but in a delayed way, for his voice was now grotesquely out of sync with the movement of his lips. Light shrunk. She saw only a Water Tribe man: his skin was pale but those were Water Tribe cheekbones, Water Tribe eyes. The word  _fundamental_ floated up; she was thinking out of her husk, oddly calm— _what would he do, if he were to expose someone’s true color in front of the whole city?_

She was determined not to use bending. It seemed an insult.  _We’re capable of adapting_ , it was Katara’s voice, coming up in a sound gloop somewhere deep in her head,  _but we’re also a strong community; we can get over anything by sticking together._

He was already coming this way. She wasn’t sure if the plan was going to work but she had to give it a try. Korra allowed herself a slow smile: so, it was going to be one of those dances.

 

________________________________________

 

On the twenty third day of November, 170ASC, the citizens of Republic City witnessed not a fight but a spectacle. Just look at them! Both so quick! But in completely different styles! Pure  _gold_! And yet they noticed at once that there was something different about the way Korra moved—in pro-bending matches, she’d always seemed the epitome of rightness. Justice herself couldn’t fight more  _correctly_  than Korra. But that afternoon, on that stage, she was nastier than a Wolfbat. Unbeknown to these people, Korra was employing the skills she had seen in one of three ancient scrolls, years before she came to the city. Technically it was still Water Tribe style, the essence of which was also balance, and yet partly because the forms themselves seemed revoltingly savage, partly because it could cause much more damage than traditional waterbending, most Water Tribe warriors had chosen not to learn it. In the course of time, it had become little known. At the maroon title  _Discipline and Punish: On Bloodbending and the Evolution of Unpurified Purists_ , Korra had skipped the second scroll in disgust. The third one, its title written in cobalt, was called  _The Archaeology of Demolishing Reconstruction._

But before she could open it, an appalled Katara walked in and snatched these scrolls away. There was a serious conversation and promises were made. Korra, being Korra, had spent the next few days secretly practicing what little she had remembered from the first scroll, but stopped soon. The moves alone had felt too venomous: what it did to water was mostly turning it into different shapes of ice instead of making it flow, not so much pushing and pulling as swinging and swiveling. Speed was supreme, elegance neglected.

Amon was no stranger to this. He had himself practiced to the same scrolls—all three of them. In fact the style alarmingly resembled chi-blocking. Had she finished the training or chosen bending, he might have easily ended the fight, but it was exactly her inexperience and incompleteness that had made those already quick-as-hell attacks even dirtier. Slightly distracted by the irony of this, he found himself on the receiving end of a chest-flank-stomach combo. Apparently, there was nothing evil in hiding your wrath. Everything was excessive: Korra didn’t jump, she  _leaped_ ; she didn’t hit, she  _walloped_. It wasn’t so much fighting now as demonstrating opposite beliefs. Even though no bending had been displayed so far, it had gone from Non-bender vs. Bender to Martyr vs. Tyrant. In every way that Amon was unduly suffering, the Avatar was relentless and underhand. And when she successfully pursued him with an iron hold and delivered another elbow smash, the arena rocked with fury. Something was seriously  _off_  about this duel, everyone had noticed; the Avatar was somehow the fast one, and Amon the poor clumsy sod.  _Is our leader trying to make a point by offering himself to such cruelty?_  they wondered. Because now kneeling with one hand on his belly, he seemed to be speaking silently yet eloquently:  _See my face! See how I suffer! I am simply the mirror of your profound grief, and she what’s deeply wrong with the world! I am fated to enlarge your sense of human conditions by poking my own nose into Great Pain!_ All this in a contorted face.

What happened next proofread this silent speech. Their leader was much stronger, after all. So, when sufficient time had passed,  _Misery_  and  _Oppression_  served, it was only inevitable that Amon caught her wrist and then followed up with a fierce jab to the left rib.  _Finally,_  Chi-blocking. At this the arena became pandemonium: their Hero had righted himself as Evil Avatar fell to the floor with a sharp hiss. But in a moment she was on her knees again, and this time Amon didn’t disappoint: he ducked a sweeping— _Equalist Style_ —jabbed her twice, once on the left arm, once on her spine— _that’s right, stay down you little shit_ —and then clutched her hair, dragging her towards the edge of the stage. There was a blank look on that scarred face, as if he had been giving these people a lecture and the Avatar had volunteered to help him expound on the principles of ass-kicking seriatim. Some in the crowd were already practicing their imaginary speech to their imaginary kids born to the new world:  _See, son, there had been dire times, but all you need in life is faith, just as we had faith in him_ …

"That’s it!" shouted a very red Mako and marched forward. But apparently it wasn’t quite time for the triumph of Good over Evil. Not yet. Being dragged like this had left both her arms free, and the one that hadn’t been chi-blocked connected swiftly with his crotch—

 _Oooh!_ cried Republic City. He released her hair and made a blind grab. He caught nothing.

"Korra—" Mako reached a hand to her but stood riveted. Something was not right. With an unhinged smile she peeled herself off the floor and hissed I’m fine. And then, as if to prove the theory to herself, she staggered towards Amon, curled up with his forehead pressed on the ground, and turned him on his back with a solid kick on the stomach. The crowd had another outburst, but was then plunged into a silence at this even weirder second round. She straddled him and started hitting his face in a rather pointless way, the kind of punching you’d see in an androgenic bar fight instead of a match between two martial artists. Amon collected her wrists in one hand and flipped her over with an arm locking her throat. But too quickly, she wrapped her legs around his neck and pinned him down again with impressive strength. Everyone stood stupefied—it was like watching two children wrestle in the mud. Much grunting, no harm done.

There was, to Amon, something humiliating but liberating about not having to calculate every move anymore. What’s my stand; where’s our root; in what miraculous angle do those lips curve up. The pain in his crotch was still blistering but it also felt strangely distant. He saw the Avatar on top of him with that same trapped-animal look, a silent warning in her shaky bottom lip. He saw the line; it was so tempting—

And if I break you here and now, in which ways would those tiny bits fly?

Writhing out of his grip, she reached frantically for his face and managed to wipe off the make-up on his brows. She spit a laugh on his face. “Careful, Noatak—your Water Tribe is showing!”

Growling, he grasped her fingers and bent them back so hard he heard the bones snap. An inrush of sinking. He must have stared slantwise into her eyes. He must have hit a chi-point below her right chest and lifted a limp Avatar up. For somehow her head was under his arm, and he was reaching for Ya Men…  _One more step, one more, and this will be over_.

With one arm around his waist, the other flailing in the air, Korra felt something warm pressing the back of her neck; she saw Tenzin and Mako’s feet, upside down, moving this way—

_"Fuck this!"_

The world watched the Avatar reach for the back of Amon’s knee and pick him up, bridal style. Although normally the groom wouldn’t then drop the bride on his knee. He saw a flash of white, followed by a longer, larger blackness, engulfing. Vision hazed; the first and last thing came to his conscious was her face looming over with a sneer… The world gasped at the python-shaped fire. Blue as energy, hissing and wrapping around Korra’s unblocked arm. Years from now on, people would still find themselves in dispute about whether they had fallen into a collective delusion that afternoon—it came and went too fast, the fire, and the next thing they saw was an Avatar floating with her limbs twitching, and the city’s most beloved non-bender, sticking his arm out with his fingers curling into a claw. The world flinched at the sound of organs clashing; the world looked away from their faces, which somehow had the very same twist at the moment—a mixture of agony and frenzy and, oddly enough, a flare of great relief.

 

________________________________________

 

I’ve waited for this moment with an intensity that through its long suppression is now asserting itself with volcanic necessity and this moment waits until I am forty. I like bloodbending, I’ll say it, and to bloodbend is, if it isn’t too farfetched a comparison, not so much dislocating the bones and controlling the flow as it is a vulgar yet effective delivery from self to other selves, and by “selves” I am here referring to not fleshly bodies but the supposedly essential elements of other people: wholeness, consistency, and yes, memories. Whether my father had in his time reached this state of complete transference I cannot say. I only remain the vision of and inside  _her_ —she is not frightened. In fact this would be one of those rare occasions I’ve encountered in which the word “elated” might fit properly. She is transitorily and largely elated. I cannot say I’m surprised, and find myself fully aware but surprisingly indifferent of the fact that the whole city had just realized what I am. A liar about and to himself. Because the moment she showed up with the firebender boy I saw myself fed up: everyone has been so busy; I myself have been engaged in the preparation for this nothing. No-thing. Why the fuss, really? Here is another matter I’ve been considering frequently and futilely of late: Do I even care about these people?

I’ve also been asking myself whether True Power can express itself in the secondary physical characteristics of eye color, eye shape, and what I now perceive in those eyes as childish triumph. A girl from a line of fearsome half-gods. It is not the likelihood of her Avatar State that I’ve been dreading, even though I am fully apprised of what had happened between Avatar Aang and my father. Yakone was way beneath my level, Avatar Aang was far out of her league, and therefore I am to believe the chasm of physical power between us to be unfathomable for her, unproblematical for me, and puzzling to those who aren’t part of this so-called duel.

Why have I let myself be so easily manipulated into manipulating her, then? I ask myself. It could be her eyes. For now in the influence of the daylight, they have become a scorching horror at which I cannot look directly—they have become the sun. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve had an erection since our preposterous tussle, which erection, thanks to an earlier incident, is getting more fiercely painful by the second, but which, thanks to the nature and now I’m suspecting the purpose of my garments, isn’t remotely close to becoming a real embarrassment. And as you can see I’m still able to think straight; everything appears slow when time collapses like this. Now, the true dilemma: if I insist on taking her bending, then I will be truly and utterly the guy who accomplishes  _nothing_ —and not just in a mirthless humor of literal sensitivity. But without an Avatar who possesses on some level a formidable power, and who has been, as I can tell by the rush of blood and pheromone in her lower abdomen, considerably drawn to my own physicality, which fact I can’t say is unflattering, but anyway without an Avatar like this, the United Force will soon be in control of the situation. These are riled citizens, among whom the conflict will not cease even if I manage to escape, which I can say is beyond easy.

Should I, though, just leave things behind like this?

Meanwhile I am or have been sensing something more bestial and muscular than conscious taking me over. It begins in my sacrum and is currently shooting up along numerous chi-points, I’m getting the feeling Tan Zhong, Guan Yuan and Zhang Men. It transcends all the memories and visions and Objects of Passion and eventually Passion itself, wanted or unwanted. It has become  _elemental_. In a gelatinous vision I see myself with a purple fist adding force to the bloodbending grip, on her and on the airbender master and the firebender boy and ah, what do you know, my lieutenant.

The kids are simply too terrified to move, as are most people off and on the stage. There should be  _some_  boundaries, I suppose, though I’m not sure they are there for me. I see in a gelatinous vision something I don’t see—for there is such a thing, for I’m gradually and now mostly inside her now. I see in a gelatinous vision my father’s face, his body prisoned in earth and this is the first time I, Noatak, look into Aang’s gray eyes after our last encounter twenty years ago and he is a very handsome man at what I’m to untimely assume again my own age, even though the concept of time is now presenting itself as quite a schizophrenic asshole and I see myself standing on the crater of a volcano with lava burning up and thick smoke and a beautiful enormous maroon dragon protectively encircling my undeniably moribund body and then comes an enveloping rush of being thrilled and  _serious_  about dying for my people—my people—and I am close to tears. I am happy. I am hugging an offensive-smelling but too cute polar-bear dog and Dad’s calling us back for dinner. I’m not hungry but there’s always room for Mom’s zucchini bread so yay! I am trying my best to concentrate on the fire and make sure the flame doesn’t reach the edge of this stupid-ass leaf—UGGH! Who the hell invented this method! I can shoot fireballs since I was five and now I’m learning how to breathe again? On Aang’s Memorial Island there are footsteps clicking behind me and then there’s that mask. His speed is uncanny and I feel helpless just like in those dreams but now that we actually meet, he just seems bored even when we’re already fighting. Am  _I_  boring this guy? Am I really that big of a moron to these people? I don’t know  _what_  this is but somehow I want to kick-start this jackass, I want to see him pissed off and scared, I want to see his face behind that mask… Is he even capable of expressions? I don’t know how he did it but now I’m on the floor with my limbs numb. Hurting like hell and numb—how! It doesn’t look like he wants to harm me or take my bending. So what’s your deal, dude? And now that I can feel my arms and legs again, you’re once again out of line! Oh you’re so out of line, threatening me and being so close and pressing against my back and all that—OK that’s it shithead…

The fire is blue and it feels oddly good. It’s tickling my spine and this must be what it feels like to be the sun: so cold and hot and calm and raging at the same time! With my gut I see disaster, see you’re scared and human after all. With my eyes I see us falling into a stalemate where I can’t use bending and you can’t use chi-blocking. I see power matching. Too much power. I see me lunging over the collar of your tunic and biting you on the neck because it seems the only choice left. I see you smelling, more than anything else, like a winter storm back in the Compound, which… I don’t hate? I see me not knowing why I’d do any of this; see tears on my nose and then your clothes. I’m very convinced I see home, in front of my eyes and somehow high overhead. I miss home. And unfortunately, you smell like home.

After I put my clothes on, I see me asking why you hate us benders so much. I do that, talking too much when it’s awkward. I see you saying you don’t, and me believing that. Because you simply don’t kiss someone—even it’s probably in a trance—right to the spot. You don’t fill them up and turn them inside out. I see me lifting your mask, and you stopping me before I get a good look above your lips. You taste like loss, and I taste on you myself with an inside deeper than I think I have.

And now I see me being a moron. Really, Korra. I see me lying to my friends for a month, and you to a people half of your life. I see me thinking like you, and you acting like me. You see: I see a terrible and too perfect match.

The fire is blue and it feels oddly calm. This time it’s not because I’m angry, but because I know it’ll make you angry. I see I’ve truly pushed you into a corner, and see insignificant pain following—I thought it’d hurt more, though; I guess it just doesn’t count in comparison—and that pain vanishing into a black hole, now invisible. Which means trouble because so far I’ve never closed my eyes, I don’t trust myself enough. But apparently it’s come to a point because I don’t think Mako and Tenzin and—why do I even care?—your lieutenant could handle what I’m to assume is not technically pain but some sort of shift?

Before I close my eyes I see you see me. Now, I see in a gelatinous vision your father’s face, his body prisoned in earth…

 

________________________________________

 

The air chakra is located in the heart. It deals with love and is blocked by grief. Lay all your grief out in front of you… Let the pain flow away.

 

Which is never to say that I love that guy. And I’m drawing this conclusion on  _facts_ , because I don’t suppose you would glow up and blow a gale that knocks someone you  _love_  out of the window. I can still see, but only from above me. Now that I don’t feel him in her anymore, there is emptiness echoing in both our chests, a vacuum threatened to be broken by more sadness than it seems could belong to anyone. I feel sorry for that girl, but am afraid even to look at her, afraid her heart would burst. The ability to stay inside of myself has truly and utterly disappeared, which scares me to no small degree because I see my whole life is to an extent why  _she_  is here, roaring, the fire blazing out of her mouth still blue. You know how sometimes you have that dream where you’re naked in public and everyone is pointing and laughing? Well, this is not like that. It’s worse. The stadium becomes so very  _tight_. I don’t even want to follow him but I know I have to get  _outside_ , where air is available. I try to find my friends but can’t move with my head stuck at this angle that only allows me to stare  _down_ : she’s still roaring. I pull my hair. Wake up.

Finally. The Avatar decides to get out also. So she gets out, but only after producing an earthquake and a small tornado, which thankfully scare away the rest of the people that haven’t already bolted at the sight of bloodbending and then blue fire. Here I indulge a bit—velveteen red, racing blue, where’s the line?—but only for a second because we are now outside the arena. I think I should warn Noatak that a crazy Avatar is trying to kill him, or maybe I should just kill him. I don’t have enough time to decide because there he is, on the water, which is reddened by the sun. He’s so slow. I expected him by Tarrlok’s words to be some sort of almighty bending god, but his waterbending is even more disappointing than his bloodbending. That water pinwheel is a nice trick, though. I see her using the same thing. I see that familiar curiosity to know what he looks like when he’s scared shitless rushing back. I see her as an overly cruel child with a magnifying glass staring ominously at a carpenter worm—except she can just summon the sun to end the worm on her own. This is boring: in a moment she’s at his back. With four water whips she throws him from Yue Bay onto the dry land. And around us are Air Temples. How did we even get here?

She’s doing things I don’t do, hearing noises I don’t hear. Now she walks hot-faced to Amon groaning on the platform where I’ve practiced airbending. (It’s quite a view from where I stand, the wind in her hair, the Yin Yang pattern under her feet and all that. Forever below. Below me.) She clutches his throat, lifts him up to her eye level, his toes frantically searching for solid ground.

Which does not make sense because we used to be so much shorter than him.

He’s turning purple. Now, I know I’m  _strong_ —it seems to be the only word ever used to describe me. And I’ve until this point worn it so very proudly.  _But seriously_ , _what does it mean?_  I wonder as she starts inclining her head to the perfect angle that says “now show me some of that mortality”, _Is this why we’re given power? So we can choke people to death for lying to us?_

Fury halves. Also divvied-up is a dim haze inside me, folding into its own ends where rosy lights start and fade. And just like that I’m down, in, and me again. I pause for a beat of a pause, in which I look into his eyes, in which I see mine, in which there is no more glowing. When my boring eyes refocus out of his, I see no fear in that face. Fragility, maybe, everything else seems filmed, alien. Now that the make-up’s completely gone, I somehow find him uglier with strong brows and full lips. I have never seen someone so good-looking this hideous. I release him and push him to the ground. Now I feel cold. Is it November already? When I slowly sit down and try to enjoy an intake of early winter air, all my muscles scream at the same time. The feeling is now physical in nature—emotions have all turned to vulgar pains, mostly on my heart, somewhere I am to assume near the left atrium.

Which is funny because I don’t remember ever hearing the word  _atrium_.

He’s done coughing, hugging his knees with a childish look on his face. I shift a bit, meaning to kick him but my body won’t allow that much action. I look down at three fingers on my right hand presenting themselves in a strange angle, and can’t for the life of me recall when they got broken, and then I look away to the mountains tiredly dulling into the last of the sun. In this unheroic silence, a stranger could walk on the island and think some bully had just taken our favorite toy. I’ve always thought that my first time in the Avatar State would be majestic, that I’d meet Aang and he’d teach me some epic energy bending. But then again I had also thought my first time with a man would be on a bed. Not like this. Nothing like this.

It finally enters me as a human fact what a failure I am, and leaves me by a weeping that makes my entire body convulse.

Which is just plain stupid because of how much it hurts to cry.

 

________________________________________

 

I admit, in my younger days I had imagined seeing the kind of gentle, rhythmic tears on a woman’s face, in which feminine grief I’d grow into a better man. But instead I’ve got Korra crying next to me with a virtual misery that one would never expect from Korra. I now sit near a girl who a minute ago was trying to kill me. I don’t find her terrifying in that state, though. I know that wasn’t her. I consider for a second putting a hand on her shoulder, helping her ease this substantial pain I caused, but instead I find myself struck by an epiphany, which of course is not to say that a ray of sunlight is miraculously thrusting through the clouds on fire and hitting me in the face, but anyway I see or decide in this epiphany that hurt is caused only by thinking. So I stop thinking, put down my hand. The wind is thin and coy. Pushing through the red sheet of Yue Bay, two battleships are coming this way.

The cell is a platinum one with no window. (Apparently can’t be trusted with light or guards.) Duty-bound to be in despair. Find no such thing. Fully grown into a new indifference. Look bored. Get bored. Korra is what defines time: she comes with meals. (Apparently can’t be near anyone but the Avatar.) No conversations. She sits in the corner, crosses her legs ankle-on-knee, waits until the meal finishes, stands up, slams the door on her way out. The slams are an entertainment of their own: assessing the anger behind each, feeling a thin wind caused by each. These define time.

She can’t seem to stop staring, though there is no hatred in her eyes. Can’t read them. The gazes are broken, each constituted of innumerable small gazes, each as long as the gaze itself. These define time.

The third night—defined by the slams and gazes—she shows up shivering, sweaty.  _They’re gonna kill you, both of you, no trial… There was talk of trial but the demonstrators blocked City Hall… It’s beyond fucked-up out there. Tenzin’s still dealing with them and there’s this press conference tomorrow morning but I don’t think he can hold much longer_ —

The words mean nothing. Should be kissing her.

_… I don’t know what’s the deal here but I’m pretty sure they’re already deciding between electrocution and injecting and I think I heard someone mention dragging some sort of scaffold out again. The fuck—I thought I was the one going nuts… And even if they don’t give you a death penalty I’m pretty sure these people are just gonna tear you into pieces themselves. Now that most of them are non-benders this whole thing is getting much worse—anyway there’s no time now, they know I’m here with food and I didn’t have a plan but on the way here I found this patrol boat and waterbent it here—I checked the tank, it should get you far enough. And your brother, I suppose, there’s talk that you two are in this together. So just take him and don’t ever come back. Just got the key to his cell, wait, I got it… here—_

Lean for her lips, get kneed. The pain brings thinking back. I stumble onto the bed, my hand again on my crotch. I hear me cussing, see her putting down the food tray and bending over beside me with her hands covering her mouth and laughing and at the same time looking terribly sorry for laughing and unable to stop laughing and now I’m laughing also at something so fatally hilarious that we keep going until the cell seems to have run out of air. I don’t think she means to do this next but she’s crouching down in convulsion and resting her head against my knee with an arm wrapped around my calf. I don’t know how much time has passed before her laugh turns into tears. We don’t speak much—she knows my names, I know what she tastes like, that’s all. I cup her face but make no effort to wipe the tears. I let them run in rivulets down her cheeks and pool in the soft of my palm. We apologize at the same time; it does so little at the same time. Things happen in a still loop now. She catches her breath and says there’s only one way for this to work, I’d have to bloodbend her into unconsciousness and make it look like I escaped; she says she won’t go into the Avatar State if she’s calm; I tell her I’ll do none of that; she punches me again, this time right on the knee nerve so I involuntarily kick her in the chest. Apologize; get yelled at ( _either do this or you both die, your pick dickhead_ ); see Tarrlok’s face; see Yakone’s; see Mother’s; see the old family house; see the old barn; see the river cutting through Aipalovik; see Korra; help her up; hold her closer; promise her it won’t hurt much if she doesn’t resist; feel a tiny nod against my chest; feel her heart again; puts her gently on the ground; apologize again, and again, and again.


	3. Sessions

Being bloodbent starts with you walking into an animal pain, a new gravity sucking you in until all squeaks and rushes of air shoot clean from you into a new air. You get oriented by the sound of your blood after a while, thinned of minutes, thinning into a pure knock. At this, light shrinks, shaking sounds off; it’s now the blackness somewhere ahead allowing you a peephole view of true terror. The name-tagged regret that’s always been there. Just for you. Some fugue, this has to be, from which if you struggle upright this instant you’ll be squinting at the Antarctic sun, a swollen drop by the east wing, where Katara lives, where you will rush through breakfast before four hours of earthbending practice. Lateness isn’t an option with Master Yu. Careful not to catch the sun again. You are, after all, the only kid who had, despite all warnings, investigated the crescent sun in an eclipse until your retinas started to burn. And here you are, inflated, hooded in this vascular terror, all pupils, waiting. Start wondering in a body readily reaching all edges: perhaps pain isn’t the result of a touch unwelcome but the ache for a touch undelivered. Perhaps if you wrap your arms around something long enough it will eventually become yours, it will move and hold still and reveal its sweetest inmost folds just to you, not in a sense of finitude or surrender but simply because you held palely onto it first, groping its emptiness as if stepping over a promontory, flapping black waves at your feet, inviting. To end this all you have to do is let go. And you keep on holding, alive and freshly twenty and unwell, not knowing which face belongs to whom. And perhaps, just perhaps, it’s not the earth that’s tipping on its axis but you on someone else’s. Palms dug, your pulse new and better on a surface of sandpaper brown. Eyes rolling up and aside and back up to keep from facing the maw swirling open at your bluely summoned Sorry. Unfelt by others because only you know it simply doesn’t get more imperative than the Fall or hang, the How much more and the If so why not why not why not, just as you know pain will not be once you enter its setulose maw and it will have you and you will be free. Now choose.

 

/*/

 

“Stop, you’re hurting her!”

“Thanks, Tarrlok, nobody noticed until you brought it up…”says Korra, rounding a dead shoulder in some kind of thespian moment. “Seriously, every single time.”

“Are you sure this is the only way?” Tarrlok looks away from her. “Maybe you shouldn’t be training her the same way he—that—I mean she’s no bloodbender after all.”

Reaching a hand under his sleeve, Noatak feels his patience, bulky enough in the past three years, slipping away at a revengeful speed. He squints: the sun is so malevolent he can locate it without looking. Training outside the barn was all Korra. “Still smells like someone died in there,” she said and was not wrong. But Noatak suspects that’s not the only reason. The barn is a solitary thing, out of a plain ground, without reason. She must hate every bit of this. Day five, it really couldn’t be simpler, with him standing still, Korra trying to close the twelve-foot distance. At first he thought it was because the grip was too hard, but even after he diluted it to where a ten-year-old Noatak would barely feel it, she still cannot, quite physically, move one inch forward.

“Do we have to go through the theory again?” Noatak says, looking down at his shadow. “Because it really boils down to one point—one thing I told you—”

“Cathexis,” says Korra over him, and then crouches down with a silent scream on her face. “Cathexis, cathexis, cathexis—trying my naked best here, man; it’s not working!”

“Are you? really trying?”—lapsing into a slightly vulgar accent—“For the umpteenth time: pain only exists when you let it”—with Korra mouthing the same words—“let go your side so it could abandon you then. Not the other way around…”

Their lips stop moving as red starts making its way down Korra’s nose like held breath. For a second no one moves. Curious how, after that, a simple nosebleed can make you panic to this degree, thinks Noatak and almost trips himself stepping up. Korra raises her hand skyward.

“What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?”

“You do realize your nose is bleeding.”

“Uh—no, I’m just doing this for good fun.”

“How is raising your hand going to help?”

Korra looks at him, looks at Tarrlok. “Left nostril, raise right arm to stop bleeding… never heard of it?”

Tarrlok makes three small sounds. “Adorable, teaching a waterbender how to swim.”

“Shouldn’t you be taking note right now?” Her eyes thin. “It’s not like you know how to swim orstanch this.”

From Noatak’s expression, there seems to be a stench coming from her direction. Korra, somehow still allergic to this gaze, looks away. It sometimes reminds her of her grave little cousins, who have the same etherish way of staring at something either inside you or behind you, less offended than removed, for a moment, from the wholeness of a conversation as if there is simply no breadth needed when it comes to dealing with you.

“Didn’t mean that,” she says, soothing the air with her free hand, determined not to cast a look at Tarrlok. It’s still running, quickly to her chin, gathering and falling to the ground, leaving big symmetrical drops suggestive of a perpendicular descent. They fall into a new silence, waiting, considering blood.

Hardly a feeling of adequacy, during and after, but also not the outright frustration: only the complete obliteration of Being Good at Something. For the past five days Noatak has been abstractly kind to her, keeping all his concentration on teaching her how to concentrate, giving tedious elaborate lectures about her body being the sole bulwark between petty dyspnea and something larger and crystallized. Strangely enough, it all sounds awfully like what Katara once said to her. Only this time it’s without the much more decent context—was she ten or eleven? was it a raptured tendon or a dislocated joint? Now she only remembers lying on the bed that night trying to remember a time when her ankle didn’t hurt like steel blue. There are some injuries healers can only do so much about.

There has been no reopening of certain topics, not even during the brief healing sessions he insists on having each night, starting right after her first long day of futilely resisting bloodbending. Her mind was elsewhere; she still thought of mentioning what happened earlier—the kiss in front of the barn, in the hallway, or what happened to Tarrlok that made him seem on the verge of imploding. But she swallowed the words back as he kneeled in front of her like it was the most natural thing to do in the world, putting a hand on the twisted ankle. At first she tried to convince him she was fine and was at least capable to deal with minor bruises, but then quickly shut up as he put the other hand on her knee. Her calf became part of a loop, she reckoned at once. No water, no glow, nothing like the healing she’s learned. It felt… inside, of something chocolatey and constantly flowing, as if by osmosis the delivery had passed through the fabric of the night gown and seeped right into her. That was when Korra closed her eyes and decided if he was to play dumb, so was she.

It’s still awful, she reminds herself not to justify bloodbending just because it feels good—in fact it’s exactly the being healed by what caused hurt that alarms her. But that’s not her biggest concern. Has it been five days already? Korra has to actively confirm with herself that she’s indeed running out of time. The exigency feels artificial, requires her awareness and nothing more. The days have become indistinguishable not just because the lack of sunset; they start to bleed into each other and she can’t delineate one pale hour from another.

These lessons, she’d expected them to be awful but at least exciting, the kind of horrified fascination when she was being bloodbent in the woods the first day she got here. Pure nonnegotiable physicality, lips circumscribing the air, tongue piercing something willing, teeth crunching the moisture of its fire—

Avatar Korra once recalled herself eating fire in her childhood, biting on a mulberry pie while sugar was still bubbling on the edge; the filling immediately yielded to her teeth. What intimacy, what sweat hurt when things enter within and open themselves up readily as a response to your own imperative inquiries!

It destroys slowly the bender and thoroughly the victim, is all she’s ever heard people say, with eyes now seem needlessly widened. The real lesson, in all its real-life banality, feels more like getting punched repeatedly in the soft belly of ego for just no reason at all. And then there’s Tarrlok, amazingly shaping himself up to be even more excruciating than three years ago to be around, giving the same knowing looks he gave in the airship on their way back from the Memorial Island, watching her fail with little sulks that somehow feel as belligerent as if he’s laughing at her from the very top of his lungs. Though Korra has this theory that for whatever reason these sulks are mostly directed at Noatak. She keeps wondering if he knows what happened, the first kiss, the one after that, the night way before all this… Does the former councilman know the true reason why he’s not rotting in jail at this moment?

“So really there isn’t a less openly stupid way to do this thing?” The nosebleed goes as quickly as it came, Korra drops her numb arm.

“That’s how we learned.” Noatak squints and looks into the barn again. His aversion to the sun has become very clear. “It’s blunt, yes, but also the only way to resist it without becoming a bloodbender yourself. Shall we remove ourselves from these obnoxious knives of light, then? I’m sure you can imagine the surprise of a not unlikely passer-by. I’d hate to come up with new excuses—as I’m sure my brother would agree, lying to Tonja alone has been quite challenging these days.”

There is an expectant silence. Korra stands up and slaps the dirt off her hands.

“That’s how we would have learned,” says Tarrlok abruptly, the first time he betrays any emotion other than contempt.

“Excuse me?”

Tarrlok cuts the air lazily. “Never mind.”

“No, please,” says Noatak leaning slightly forward and crossing his arms. “Illuminate me, what would you have done instead?”

“I never consented to this—not that you two would have listened to me. I never partook… I’m only here to make sure nothing gets out of hand.”

“No, I meant the other situation—unless of course I’m being stupid again and picking up things that weren’t there… What would you have done? if you had been, as it were, on the other end?”

Tarrlok looks at Korra. “In front of her? Really?”

“Why not. She seems to be the only one coaxing some life out of you in a long time.” Noatak takes two steps forward, so does Korra. But that’s all she does. She should be stopping this, and instead she thinks of what Aang said in one of their rare conversations—under the same frantic context—Time spent paying attention to people is never wasted.

All she knows from Tarrlok is that one night Noatak bloodbent their father and took Tarrlok with him, and before she and Mako left the attic, she was already too busy picturing punching Amon in all the humanly possible parts. It was Mako who asked what happened later, to which Tarrlok combed his hair with the fingers he was about to lose in a few days, and refused to give more details, saying they spent some time in the city but shortly separated.

“And that’s the crux, no?” Tarrlok is saying and walking into the barn. They follow. “Here comes the moment the apprentice becomes the umpire. Whose side do you think she will choose?”

“Not really my concern, no offense, Avatar,” Noatak says without looking at her. Now Korra is not sure if she wants to know: surely she can recognize a wound being reopened; there is something so virulent, so off, in the way they’re talking that she doesn’t have the heart to snap back at Tarrlok. Noatak continues, “And since we’re on the subject of choosing, I’m certain you have much to contribute, so tell me: What. Would you. Have done.”

“Anything would have been a better choice!” Korra is almost sure something just fled past them and out of the barn. “Anything would have led to a better end than the turmoil caused by your choosing.”

“You guys.” Korra soothes the fabric of her sleeve.

“I said nothing during all this.” Tarrlok slightly shifts on the boulder Korra bent out of the ground days ago, lacing his wooden fingers with the good ones. “This self-transcendence through pain nonsense is his thing. Gets passed down, I get it. Effectively narcotic. If I’d never been through it I’d be truly impressed. But it’s a whole different matter if you’re just using it to get back at her. It’s more disappointing than disturbing. Seems a little beneath you, doesn’t it?”

“And yet you still do not admit the Body orbits Pain,” Noatak says, and Korra can tell this is what’s important to him, what he actually believes: he has this habit of scratching his index fingers with his thumbs in brief rare moments of being serious.

Tarrlok smiles creamily, looks at Korra for a second too long, and then turns to Noatak in a way that is supposed to let him know that this is now without leeway. “You know, whenever I repeated that night to myself I’d always set up a scenario where I was being interviewed.”

“Of course you would.”

“Not because I was picturing myself going places but simply because I wanted to convince someone, anyone, other than myself that you weren’t a dick.”

“Guys, seriously. Let’s not—”

“And I’d so carefully arrange the words to give the night a more respectable background so that you’d in the following scenes seem, well, less of a dick, and after all synonyms for snowstorm and congestion were exhausted, I still found no such way to dilute, so now you know how you’d always come up in all my rather pointless reminiscences.”

Exhaling in understanding, Noatak gestures faintly I can imagine that.

“But here’s the thing, for a while I felt tiny and consumed by not dread of our future in the city, but the possibility that I would never be able to forgive you. You, the one who got us into it; I was so desperately clinging to you and quietly resenting you at the same time, and I didn’t even feel resentment when you were threatening to kill him just so I would abandon everything and leave with you. Only back then I didn’t know that was resentment, which apparently could be a malformation of love, or least I was told so, repeatedly, on different couches that somehow had all been ridiculously large. But before that I could only register the feeling as something quite different from this mucilaginous anaclitic… thing I’d been squandering on you. What a waste. Whatever it was I’m just glad it wasn’t inexhaustible in nature… Ah yes, you two go ahead and give me that look, go ahead. Wince inside. See if at these words you could ever wince harder than I did.”

“I’m not—it’s… Can we just keep practicing? Noatak?”

“No dear you have nothing to fear from me. Go ahead, don’t inhibit yourself. Whatever merit this bit of history might hold for you, explore. I now lack terms for most things. Me, whose vocabulary has been as large as the four nations since I was all elbows and knees.”

The barn is so dusty it seems ideal for a sneeze. He feels along the outline of his jaw and continues like this, one word flowing from another, with seemingly no punctuation or breath: “Which reminds me of another thing I realized, by myself, during all those overpriced hours on this particularly grotesquely large couch, where I had also taken some seriously expensive naps. It was that certain complexes were better succumbed to rather than striven against. So I learned to define things by what they’re not, in short ingenuous terms, here goes: they are not good, Noatak, the things you have done and are doing now. You are not a very good person. And you, Avatar, stare all you want with that cornered look as if wishing the floor of this barn would swallow this entire scene up into the belly of the spirit world: this, right here, is very much happening. And it’s not terribly couth to make that face when someone’s tidying everything up nice and clean and offering it to you in a handbasket you don’t even deserve, sure, but feel free to flinch all you want. And, to make it easier for you, here is what you do in the event of Evil People acting bizarre: make tiny fists of your hands and feet and sit very up and very still… Look at your man Noatak, go ahead, look at him, see how he is appearing convincingly to contemplate and radiating no body heat while doing so? You can’t see them but no doubt those are fists in those boots. So try and keep up.”

From where Korra stands, Noatak is going further than crossing his arms, one hand on his shoulder, half-embracing himself, somewhat effeminate. He partly faces Tarrlok, partly looking with a clinical interest at the door. While Tarrlok is saying What would you have done, you kept asking? Let’s see… well I didn’t have the guts to admit that I made a horrible decision choosing to go with you that night, nor did I have the guts to blame you for threatening to kill him and making me abandon her. The more I thought of it, the more suspicious I was that you had the night all planned out… inviting Nyla was all you, wasn’t it? And if Mother found out about their affair they’d definitely get into a colossal fight, which she did, and they fought the fight, during which you just sat there as if watching clans at war—and whenever he got angry he’d always take us out for a long one… All you needed was that last where you knew he’d snap. And there I was, believing that you were the one pushed into the extreme… Is that what that was? It was, wasn’t it, Noatak. Look at me when I talk to you. You asked for this, the both of you. I never brought this theory up, terrified by just the white tip of the thought, going crazy by worrying about going crazy. For so many years I replayed the night over and over, every single detail horribly zoomed in and out and rematched: there he was, with his glorious plans and the boat tickets just for the two of you. And you, with your own little _visions_ , in that fifteen-year-old glory of yours, looking every bit the ultimate Water Tribe Man. Noatak I’d very much like for you to look me in the eye right now, and excuse me for yelling next but _The Body Orbits Pain_? Are you fucking kidding me? Come on, say something, anything, where is that formidable charm now? The two of you so deserved each other… You’ve got a solid knack for shifting weights and blames, Noatak, having others fight your war at minimum effort. So there I was, at my sniveliest, shoved into adolescence, waiting so anxiously for your confession or even just a simple apology. But you chose to keep living up to all his rules: in our five years in the city, you never explained, never apologized. You had so many chances. Every second we spent together you could have just come clean. So the only thing left for me was to blame myself. Things like, Maybe I should have just called your bluff and let you killed him that night; maybe if I’d had the guts to bloodbend you in the first place none of this would have happened… thoughts like this, tickling the back of my mind. But thankfully the not apologizing gets passed on down the line. I’m glad I never said anything you didn’t deserve to hear.

Not unamusing that I managed to see just what you were after you left for Fire Nation with Ursa—how did that pan out, by the way? never had the chance to ask—I remember being in the hallway of the Police Headquarter the very next day, waiting in line to submit my application—there was a brief time in law enforcement when waterbenders had the predominance over earth- and firebenders, remember? when Lin was in the Earth Kingdom for her mother’s funeral and dealing with the remaining Daili agents? As I said, I was waiting, after two brothers who evidently bent different elements—the recruiters took only the older one’s application, saying Sorry boys there are enough firebenders in the force now, we only need waterbenders, and I remember the waterbender boy saying something in an unnecessarily loud voice, he said No him, no me, and then took his little brother by the arm and left the building in a kind of theatricality that was meant to resonate. On my way back I went to Narook’s and sat by our usual table and thought of what you would have done, had I been the firebender boy they deemed superfluous. Unwanted. You’d have taken the job alone and afterwards cheered me up with something vague and effectively narcotic… I’m not here saying that’d be the wrong thing to do; I’m only saying it would be the kind of thing you would do, because whatever road presents itself, you will take, deft and so very resourceful, no hallway flamboyance, even if it meant quitting without noticing and leaving behind everything we had built. “Let go your side so the pain could abandon you.” That’s—that’s something, Noa… What kind of fire dies when fed? Do you even notice that I’ve never blamed you for bloodbending me that night, as in not to your face, not once in counseling, and never even in my own head? It was after four glasses of osmanthus wine that afternoon at Narook’s that I started hearing my knees’ vitreous crunches, each grinding shift of vertebrae, each breath halved and freezing against my teeth, bars in every direction, myself repeatedly shoved into what was demonstrably the sharp end of a hammer, all at your will; I started recalling Time’s taking brand new aspects—it wasn’t so much as passing as hovering above me hand-on-knee like some kind of asshole with a syrupy offer that went See the sharp edges on my wings will help carry you through this little boy, maybe even help retrieve the tongue you have swallowed; there’s no need to hold your breaths, no need to save them for the next second because there will be no seconds from here on, and all I ask in return is a minuscule portion of you what do you say? What does one say to this? Look here sir I’m about to Let Go of My Side of Pain? Why don’t you ask Korra, hmm? You, care to take the narrative here? Just now, what was your response to this sweet sweet proposal? Nothing? Nothing to contribute? Why I remembered kneeling on the snow and hearing someone yelling at a distance Fine take it whatever to make this stop. It can’t be me, I had immediately thought, not born in this line it can’t. Even in hunched position I could see his face: he was fucking smiling. Did you even notice? Oh wow and here we are going—you go ahead and cry young Avatar, work those effective tears effectively. Did either of us march to the city and grab you to come down here doing whatever it is that seems to you so whimsically entertaining? Point for me where the coercion lies, would you? For the love of… Noatak, give her a handkerchief or something, that’s my wife’s dress… that’s… would you stop I’m not even talking about—I didn’t mean… Right, excellent, you do that, put your hand on the back of her neck because I’m the dick here. Beautiful. I’m the inconsiderate dick who wouldn’t cater. You know I’m just about sick and tired of spending all these sleepless hours trying to plumb whence the shit had come from. Still, every time it went back to you: if you had just given me enough time, Noatak, I would have figured out something else for us to do so that you wouldn’t have to go to the city with him. But you made your own choice that night, you just couldn’t wait some more. Every decision you made, you made them without me; you never asked me if I wanted to go with you to find Aang so we’d no longer be benders… and look how well that all worked out. I don’t even know who was the bigger coward, me for not insisting on staying, or you, for leaving me five years later still, just as you would have left me that night because you wouldn’t have the courage to kill him even if I had said no to you. To you I was never a solution. I will always be there for you to condescend. Later it occurred to me just how much you hated everything, not just him, we’d all become one giant glob that seemed to you some kind of univalent demon, no? I don’t know if you still remember this but as a kid you would do this ridiculously spot-on impression of Mom, in school, when everyone was that age where they couldn’t shut up about parents—when requested, you’d just look to the ground and suddenly look up and you’d just be her, intent and grinning, with the same kind of wrinkles around your eyes that only enormous genuine smiles could produce. Do you have any idea how creepy that was? I’d look away, every single time, wondering why you’d do such a thing out of I could only imagine pure spite. And for so long I actually reproved myself for not feeling whatever it was that you felt… and I tried to put myself in your shoes, and the shoes within them: it was the very proximity of her that you could not stand, wasn’t it? That she was, without her own knowledge, displaying the kind of virtue that happened to feed upon exactly what we were going through—ostensible affliction, provided penalty—in order to fulfill its own purpose of comforting the disturbed. It was the only explanation, why you would see us being exploited from both ends… Noa, pretty much all of us hate the things that aren’t in our choices, and what little we do so meticulously choose are the things we would die for, us being an unfortunate example in Mom’s case, you being an even more unfortunate one in mine. But you—there is just no capacity left in you for such things, am I correct? It has ceased to make sense to you that some people, in this life, would love you so relentlessly pathetically despite your obvious contempt for them, no? You don’t have to pretend you disagree… honestly, just don’t. Every time you find that impulse to defend yourself on this matter I want you to think of your impression of her, arms spread, unaware, reaching distain.

Believe it or not, until this day I still don’t blame you for bloodbending me, a part of me would still rather believe that you were truly in despair. You had indeed carried so much more. And what happened three years ago in my own office didn’t exactly allow me a moral high ground. I deserved to lose the thing I got without deserving, for this alone I should be grateful to you. But that afternoon, sitting in Narook’s and freshly grown out of my skinny-flanked awkwardness, was the first time I saw so clearly, that you were made of—and could only live for—the things you hated so. It was your absence that allowed me the one true glance that you were made of what you hated even before the hate itself grew real beaks and claws. So there I was, surrounded by people for all I knew I’d have to face alone for the rest of my life, never more at a loss but somehow soberer than ever. I saw the world around me, made purely of objects, fantastically old and honest and functioning without a body, without you, Noatak. And there was something very assuasive about that fact. It was then that I started weeping into my noodles. Fat slow tears entering my very first meal eaten alone as an adult… It doesn’t matter who was to blame anymore, Noa, we are way past that. “What would you have done?”—you think an answer would mean anything? I saw every loop so very clear when you stood on the boat. I realized immediately why you got us out of jail so easily. And I recognized those stupid sparks in your eyes every time you had just narrowly got out of a debacle, already prepared to do something I knewyou wouldn’t be able to finish. I was done indulging you. I could not go through the same all over again. There were two gulls that kept chasing the boat, you didn’t notice, and I mumbled a sorry, to them, I never owed you shit. Then of course you wouldn’t just Let Go. Every fucking time. And now Trouble stands on the porch he had paid for and stares at you the same way Princess Ursa did, and Laniq, all of them… each more beautiful than the last, I’d give you that. Remember Laniq? Sure you do. I ran into her later that day after I stepped out of the restaurant, rubbing my eyes in the aftertaste of Plangent Manpain that I despised and dreaded more than any other legacies of his, more than the Material itself. She had just moved to the city to be a singer, Laniq, still cocking her head just so with a half-smile when intent. Of course she asked about you at once. For a second I fought the instinct to confess—what you did, what you were made of, what I myself was capable of doing, but by that time I had freshly exhausted all terms and excuses for you. It took me half a day, one job application and three bottles of osmanthus wine. Just like that. So you see, if I were to brief the girl on Hey so um what’s Noa been up to? then in my unprecedented spirit of candor you would have come out so fucking hideous a person, you’d be delineated as a chasm of maladies, a scarcity of whatever the wordhuman encompassed, and I just wasn’t sure if I was ready for that. I had done my share honoring the past, Noatak, the boy you once were, even the man you then chose to become—I watched you become, I had nothing left. So I defined you dead. It was all for the best. After delivering the news I spent some time on the street catching up with her in fraternal woe, until it started to rain out of a nasty sky, it was all good.

 

/*/

 

Avatar Korra feels, at tiny sharp moments, that she has no real existence except for what shedoes—what she sees or feels does not count. For three years she’s been waking up to the same animal pain, morning soaked in the bowl of night, her limbs tingling with the residue of whatever damp horror for a few minutes. Sitting up elbow-on-knee, in that period of reluctant consciousness that allows easy re-entry to sleep, waiting for the faces to retreat into the walls.

The day Katara passed away was the day Korra turned twenty. It took her longer than it should have to realize what it meant: she outlived Aang by exactly twenty years. Everyone was there that afternoon, Bumi was the only one crying. Her breathing came and went, each time shallower, fainter, and each time it came back, they would sit up very straight at once, her children. And then it seemed to stop all together. They waited for it to come back, Tenzin touched her palm with his whole fist, it looked very strange, as if he was the one answering a search. She didn’t respond to the touch.

In the department of wanting Korra to always tell the truth, Katara was alone. She was the only person who would shake her head every time when Korra kept making tiny jokes instead of being more direct, which didn’t even happen that often. But no one has minded the way she did, not even Tenzin. That night, Korra went to bed very early, hoping to meet Aang in her dream. And, as usual, the faces in the wall visited first—

The telescopically seen faces almost always visit right before sleep. Among them, features are to come in twice as many aspects and each is to be perceived with intensity and lucidity. Puke-white and smiling, the mouths swirling open with more rows of teeth than one could count. It’s not completely unbearable—to see things in dimensions that are usually overlooked. They will appear denser, more understandably composed, the features. The intermittent crossing and uncrossing of the eyes are to be vividly seen, and occasionally felt, as the features’ dimensions switch. Individually, each face is not to be recognized. They come together, sometimes mumbling meaningless things in a distinctive celiac voice, things like If you see a flame of water, swallow it.

Again, it has not been entirely unpleasant.

The next morning she made her way down to the dining room in a seasonless morning air chilly enough to tighten scalps. Breakfast. Newspaper. Checking for boat tickets back to the city. Answering the same question from Tenzin, Yep, nope, didn’t dream at all.

 

/*/

 

By the time Korra is done puking outside the barn, the sun is still sprouting spikes. She puts one hand against the wall and stands hunched waiting for her vision to come back, her head thumping like a heart. There has been a hand on her back, and when she can see again she recognizes by the boots that it’s Tarrlok’s. She doesn’t care. Her shoulder is still half-dead, the first threads of pain have radiated out of the socket and down they go, now fully into the fingertips.

Tarrlok is saying, “I’m sorry you had to see this, Korra. I didn’t mean to hurt you again—I got carried away, forgetting for a moment that I have inflicted the same on you… I’m sorry.”

She bends down again, but nothing comes up this time.

“Whatever. Just get me out of here.”

On their way back they make four stops for Korra to throw up some more. Noatak has been dead silent and doesn’t help each time she feels sick. He follows them at quite a distance that his face is past-describing. The pain on her arm has crept up into one side of her neck. And Korra considers at once asking for help. The chocolatey delivery. She senses the right thing to feel here, after what just happened, is to be disgusted by just the thought, but all she wants is to feel better physically.

Whereas Tarrlok’s constant apologizing has become truly annoying. Korra can’t spare anger any more. After the first few minutes of crying she is now numb to words. One side of her face starts to cook, the heartbeat now in her arm and ears.

 “…but you see what I meant. If you were to stay here longer Noatak would probably tell you it’s because bloodbending reflects one’s true self, itself characterless, a neutral approach that, sadly, can be used to manage all other approaches.”

“Get your hand off me, I can walk by myself.”

“Sorry… And please understand by saying all this I’m not trying to make things worse or better than they already are.” His voice is faint and reasonably strained. “What you’re seeing, it’s all the same now, part of a larger rhythm that precludes solutions, always like this, just people staring slack-jawed at the gashes on each other that they neither try nor are able to fix.”

This is the last thing she remembers hearing. There’s something surreal and silly about fainting when you know exactly when you’ll hit the ground. In a waterfall of light up it comes. Herself seen by her, asynchronous. So lie down now, why don’t you, a celiac voice is saying as she falls all the way into a horizontality that’s always been there, ignored in years of vertical moving—all that leaping, upright, faster, sturdier. Who can knock you down if you’re already flat.

 

/*/

 

Tarrlok suspects he’s the only person who can tell when a silence is changing into another texture; to a trained eye the transition would seem operatic. The sky practically an abstraction, no air moves in it. Hard to believe this is the same sun over the rest of the world at just this moment. Through a vision gone opaque with faint tears and white breath, Noatak walks up to them and takes Korra from his arms. She is so much heavier than she looks, her odor less than pleasant after all the vomiting and crying. Amid her troubled breathing, Tarrlok is reached by a new level of focus, and the ghost of his earlier outburst struggles to burn it away, leaving only an intolerable acuity of detail he has once experienced during a brief affair with opium, offered by Ursa and therefore approved by Noatak. It was right after Tarrlok approached pubescence. The psychedelic accentuation of the surroundings launched its assault by sending his eyes upward into their slack white again and again until it could be known, beyond sight and sound, that the world around him was nothing he could ever doubt, until he understood more than anything else that the banian behind them was busy with noises of grackles coming and going and crickets stridulating, the damp verdure of the famous Ember Island soil beneath his hands, richer still in late summer. Until this day he can remember lying there, feeling the shape of each blade of grass against his bare elbows and thinking, This is our crude approximation of a good life, in the meantime possessing soberly the notion—even as his fingertips were slipping away from his person—that he was, wholly and unrepentantly, his own man. He remembers Ursa lying next to him and popping one of her intra-high questions after inhaling, arm-over-face, in all her languid sixteen-year-old glory. To which Noatak chuckled softly and placed a hand on her stomach and palely exhaled into the whatever over his head. At which precise moment the sun reached the right angle to render Ursa’s auricle translucent. Now Tarrlok wonders why this is the way memory works, out of nowhere, embroidered in rich reveries that are irrelevant. As Korra’s weight is being entrusted, her nose starts bleeding again; at this Noatak looks down, the trickle rises and contains itself. And so Tarrlok is again getting Every Thing: the light film of sweat on her forehead curling the soft fuzz by her hairline into tiny half circles, the shape of her bindings distinguishable to his brother’s left palm through his wife’s sienna dirndl, and finally, decocted from the small sounds and adjustments of Noatak placing her atop a parka laid by the side of the road as well as the vacancy shortly thereafter, the texture of a brand new silence.

It’s only that what could have been is becoming their now. When Noatak eventually starts talking, it can’t be told if he’s doing it quietly or not. Tarrlok is certain whatever conversation waiting ahead has already happened. The expanse of snow sucks all resonance, everything sounds enclosed and flat.

“Before you jump to any conclusions, this is not your fault,” Noatak says, “She’s just exhausted, no real damage. You know how it can be.”

"I know it’s not my fault.” Tarrlok squares his shoulders.

"That’s awfully confident for someone who just spent the last half hour apologizing."

"And yet I just realized again I’ve been feeling guilty for something you did."

"Still—part of a larger rhythm that precludes solutions? Quite poetic a summary to the situation.”

More peculiar that Tarrlok can’t even tell if he’s speaking loudly himself. “Are you mocking me? Honestly, I wouldn’t.”

Noatak doesn’t respond to this but starts regarding him in a distinctive way, his voice carrying the air of making a careless pronouncement. This is nothing Amon, but something exclusively, Tarrlok thinks, for family. He had spoken like this a few times when they were children, purposefully skipping a syllable here and there to make himself sound less demure and, if there is any knowledge to it, Tarrlok knows this to be his brother at his most serious.

"Go home, take Tonja and Tullik and leave. Fast as you can manage."

Tarrlok can’t determine if he’s being mocked again. This must be what a rodent in a cage would feel when regarded blandly by someone in a white coat.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me perfectly."

"And why would I be leaving? It’s five more days to the carnival."

"Forget, about, the carnival." It becomes obvious Noatak is chewing the inside of his cheek. "Don’t overpack—take the cash in the attic, you know where—"

"Is this some kind of punishment? for what I said in that barn? Because even for you this is ridiculous—"

"North is not the option." At the same ambiguous volume, his voice eclipses Tarrlok’s completely. "Safer staying in places not too secluded. Coastal metropolis, if possible. Identity policies of inland towns are much more robust these days."

"I swear if you don’t tell me what’s going on…"

Dismissing him with a raised hand, Noatak scoops up some snow and applies it to the back of his neck. “I want you to know I know what your reaction will be. It’s not even real understanding I’m asking for, just a bit of hush, some neutral, static minutes, for me to explain,” he says with more and more difficulty, almost whispering in the end. “The Canines are here.”

Tarrlok’s face stays the same. Indeed the minutes ensuing are neutral and static: the concept has been so persistently concluded in his mind that it’s a mental stretch to remember the Canines as a group of people referring to themselves as tapered fangs rather than large canids. Noatak too holds his expression in place and takes a delicate step forward. Tarrlok steps back from him and puts his hand over his forehead. In front of his eyes, dots hastily linking themselves. A step after this and a step after that, all leading to the same end, until it becomes physically painful to stumble over further realizations that he has to grab Noatak by the collar, at the same time recognizing the futility of the gesture. As some kind of droll nod to their childhood: neither was averse to kicking and punching—

"Let me finish." Noatak clutches his wrists and lets go of the wooden one so quickly as if burnt. "They are here for the Avatar, okay? It doesn’t concern you or your family."

"What?" Adjusting. An effete voice in his head mumbling All this fucking theatre.

"They want Korra in Pakak, the Canines," repeats Noatak, "and me to be the one bringing her there safely, that’s all. No one is in danger—"

Tarrlok laughs mirthlessly. “Cash in the attic? Does that sound to you like something people say when there’s no danger?” He rubs one side of his face vigorously and watches Noatak half-embrace himself, again, in that slightly effeminate matter. “You told me you didn’t have anything to do with those people anymore!”

"I don’t—"

"I wasn’t done talking! Quite literally one of the first things I asked you, right after we decided to move back, was if you were still entangled in any of your old business that could make your old acquaintances track us down. You looked me in the eye and said no. Twice. Remember?”

"Yes and I was being honest. I wasn’t and am not one of them." "Well then what’s all this for," says Tarrlok, miming servility, "if of course you don’t mind me asking—”

"I have no idea," says Noatak and, as if noting how it sounds, instantly adds, "but since they came all the way to the North, I suspect it has something to do with either the portal or the chief himself."

"—and under my nose, as always." Tarrlok has stopped listening halfway through and started talking until their voices end at the same time. "Just lovely. When? When did this happen? Your little deal."

"Deal isn’t a good term. Shortly after her arrival I was approached by one of the field operatives and—"

"How was that even possible?" Resolved not to let Noatak finish one complete sentence, while expending energy on reminding himself I was promised we would get through this, promised and promised, until the notion begins to sound jejune in his own head. “We spent that whole night arguing.”

"It was the next morning," says Noatak after making sure Tarrlok is provisionally empty of further questions, "in that short window after you left for the market and before she woke up. Look, we haven’t the time to sort out details; it’s only temporary, this is just something I have to do…"

"You have to—" Tarrlok touches his eyebrow and then his nose and then his eyebrow. "So let me put this in inflexible unalterable terms—"

"Tarrlok."

"—terms so clear even you can’t bend, assuming we’re speaking the same language and that what’s left of my auditory sense is somewhat functioning and yours still immaculate—"

"Tarrlok."

"You accepted an assignment from a clandestine service full of top-of-the-game nut-jobs you’d sworn you had nothing to do with, to give away the girl who trusts you with her whereabouts—in the process of which exposing my entire family—the most dazzling part being you have no earthly idea what this is all about—"

"You have to say it like that—"

"—so you do realize how this sounds. We do speak the same language. Did share the same days—years—virtually packed with chance after chance to tell and tell and tell.”

"It’s only been—"

"Just answer this: Are you hit in the head?"

Noatak mumbles something, through the faint ringing the best Tarrlok can make of is “this puerile.”

"Well here’s a real one for you: if it’s Korra that they want and it’s Korra that they want,” asks Tarrlok, his voice cracking and faraway to himself, “why don’t they just ask her when she was in the city? Why follow her all the way here?”

Noatak, silent, rises and falls on his toes. Tarrlok takes several deep breaths and looks up: most of the stars seemed to be burning with steadiness; after registering all the constellations available, there is no choice but to look back down.

"Our last chance, this used to be," he murmurs, suddenly exposed to the possibility that he’s said more words in the last two hours than he did perhaps in six months. Not necessarily the last six but certainly some consecutive, inert days where he had no idea he was living that very last chance. Then, the feeling akin to staring at a word for too long and witnessing the word mutate into an entirely foreign thing to the eye. Only it’s with the texture of his own voice, pulled downstream into another timbre. And yet he cannot stop, nothing now stands between his bare thoughts and his lips: "They want you also. And Korra has been searching for you…” Sucking his teeth. “I thought you two had something going on… thought you actually spared something resembling true affection for this girl. So fucking obvious it seemed.”

There is a decidedly funny look on his brother’s face, only just converted from something of which Tarrlok has failed to catch a glimpse. “What,” says Noatak dully, “you mean between me and the privileged little brat who ruined more than twenty years of my work.”

"I don’t…" Some new silence, looking around, and reclaiming the necessity of being the pissed yet still pragmatic. Somehow, being the less crazy one has never in his life carried such priority. "Why can’t they just knock on the door and ask you two to go with them. Whatever happened to conversing!”

"And you think she’d just comply. Really." No matter how hard he’s trying, Noatak keeps sounding a notch more together. "Strangers showing up at the front door whose owners also happen to be practically strangers who have both at some point succeeded in subduing her against her will?" Noatak starts pacing, first with his hands behind his back and then, as if suddenly aware of how it might look, back to folding his arms, and says, "The entire point is to make sure she thinks she wants to go there with me and keep learning whatever it is she believed she could master in ten days. And it was all—” exhaling as if disposing something uninvited; looking at some spot beyond where Korra lies— “it was all good; we were… we were good. Until you had to blow up back there.”

Tarrlok’s laugh sounds hysterical even to himself. You’re still the less insane one. “Oh and this is my fault now.”

With raised eyebrows Noatak displays How are you even asking. “For one thing, I doubt she’ll wish to extend her stay after that epic monologue of yours. This could have all been avoided. And now I’ll have to figure out a way to keep her here after she wakes up…”

Tarrlok gestures faintly as in Can you even hear yourself, while Noatak continues, “You should know by now that she’s not to be forced into anything, by anyone. Not to mention that she can fully access the Avatar State—”

"Fully access? She can’t even control it, she can’t even control the color of her fire!"

"All this only makes things worse—she might not have realized it yet but she’s a legitimate deterrence to all, have I not warned you the other day?"

"Oh yes, this you told me, this you chose to reveal. Forgive me, then, for assuming you know what you’re doing.” Lowering his voice and making fists with his toes. “What a precious piece to complete the puzzle. What formidable intellect.”

"It won’t be long," says Noatak more to himself as he finally stops pacing. "I can fix all this."

"All what? How? By running errands for the assembly of the demented?”

"If you have to call it errands… yes, for now, at least. They must possess information about her conditions that I don’t." At some point Noatak must have stopped restraining himself from the Amon voice, which is so discordant with his whole look Tarrlok has to look away. "You gauge this now, Tarrlok—and maybe even the entire picture if you ever get a grip again—the sheer amount of knowledge they must have, the resources, and tell me that alone isn’t enough reason to do what they asked of me.”

"Sure… sure, a peerless cross-border intelligence agency requesting that the off-the-grid Avatar be secretly transferred without her own knowledge, by the former leader of the Equality Campaign," says Tarrlok, his smile growing wilder. "What could possibly go wrong. I’m going to take a leap here—this is all Ursa? Granted I haven’t seen her in twenty years but the whole thing sure fucking smells like her." He spins and shouts into the woods on the other side of the road. "Ursa? You here, princess? Care to catch up face to face?”

"Stop it, you’re embarrassing yourself."

"You think I care?" Another frantic turn."Ursa! Get out!”

"Listen to me!" flashes Noatak and reconstitutes himself, gently clasping his hands together. "We’re not being followed now. She’s not here. So far I’ve only talked to one of her lieutenants. Basic ground work, pinpointing and probing, does this sound like something she’d bother to do personally?"

Tarrlok says amiably “You honestly expect me to believe anything coming out of your mouth now.”

"Why would I tell you any of this if we were followed? Don’t you think I would have noticed if a living breathing human being is lurking nearby?"

"Where, then, where is she?” Tarrlok asks, and Noatak’s hand on his shoulder is at once batted off. “I never asked what happened between you two but judging from what you had been doing in the city, it couldn’t have ended with you driving off into the sunset.”

"It didn’t. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s nothing to do with our current situation."

Tarrlok releases another great flare of laughter and asks eagerly, “Is she trying to kill you? Tell me she’s trying to kill you.”

"If she was I’d be dead by now."

"Well that’s just downright disappointing."

Noatak says nothing and puts his hands on his hips, reminding Tarrlok, absurdly, of their mother. For too long he’s been waiting for a hook, this would do.

"You make it sound like you’re coerced into this…" presses Tarrlok, this time properly furious without the unhinged jollies. It does occur to him for a second that Noatak’s gesture could be inadvertent—so what. “You want this, just admit it. Whatever it is they’re planning for the girl, you crave to be part of it!”

"That’s flatly simplifying."

He speaks right over Noatak, bent on not getting punctuated: “All these months of sitting around, helping with the diaper changing, the three o’clock feeding, all this peace and fucking ennui—you must be just dying, for so something like this to happen… yes? It doesn’t concern me or my family? Guess what, asshole, when a bunch of psychopaths start hovering over my house, where my wife and son live, and requiring something from my sociopathic brother, it kind of—kind of—concerns me perhaps just a little.”

Somewhere during this Noatak has stopped calling softly his name. Tarrlok’s voice sounds to his one ear like that of a much older and less fit man. “Did they even make you a deal? that field operative? Did you hesitate for even one second?” The mucoidal whines of someone with a life sentence applying for parole and knowing perfectly the chance. “Because all my money is on you’re so keen to rejoin them they didn’t even have to ask you twice.”

"They made no such statement, and they certainly have no such intention. I already told you, it is not a deal. Call it a moment of daffiness, a naive itch for closure… whatever upsets you least. Bottom line, you know Ursa and she knows you, whatever happened between the two of us doesn’t change the fact that you two were friends. She would never hurt you."

"Still defending her, I see. You two were so made for each other. Nothing she does lacks what you wouldn’t." No intonation in his voice, he is addressing quietly something behind Noatak, who seems oddly flattered. "So what, for the last couple of days they’ve been spying on us through binoculars and keeping tabs?"

"That’s not how they operate."

"Yes, I forgot the almighty rows of fangs were too sharp and elite for such banality."

"Believe me, this is not a dangerous operation, Tarrlok. From what I know so far, it won’t even involve any violence."

"Why that’s a fucking soothing piece of information." Tarrlok nods and laughs and wheel his eyes queasily, all at the same time. "You can’t even name what it is! What happened to you, anyway? What happened to your crippling fear of being the bully? That compulsive need of being protective has always been a pain to live with but at least you considered. Reasons used to be a part of you. Has it been so long it just completely rotted away?”

"Whatever makes you feel easier." Noatak cocks his head, breathing fully into the cold. "To be perfectly honest, I’d like for you to come with me, with us—” ignoring a large sniff— “but of course it doesn’t seem likely, now that you are very much the family man.”

A sustained pause, Tarrlok can’t snap for he detects no bitterness, only a digressive, barely veiled joviality in Noatak, who is saying, “She chose me, you see? Me. It’s a thing… to be chosen by her.”

Tarrlok turns to look at Korra and realizes he has no idea which “she” he is referring to. Summer here is no more than a silence blanket of snow, as supposed to its roaring wrath; beyond the blanket there is nothing to look at. Meanwhile the not knowing where even to rest his eyes grates Tarrlok more than he’s willing to acknowledge. Noatak says, “We could have accomplished something, Ursa and I… and who knows—” turning to Korra— “maybe once again with someone in this line. I know it all sounds asinine, considering I’m in the utter dark myself, but at least it would be something.”

Tarrlok speaks under his breath: “I can’t even tell if you’re scared of her or still in love with her.”

"That’s a categorical neither."

"And same goes for you and the Avatar. One minute you speak as if you loathe her so—marginally more understandable, given the circumstances—and the next as if some sort of new chapter is destined to be written by the two of you."

"Could be both. Strikes me as high strangeness, too."

"She was right, though."

"Pardon?"

"Ursa, she was right about us from the beginning." Tarrlok pinches the flesh between his thumb and index finger, for the headache. "I don’t know if she told you this, it was one of the rare moments she talked to me without your presence, and I knew on the spot that this woman would understand how every driven gear of your head fit its driving gear better than I ever would." Scratching his nose with his pinkie, somehow catching the effeminate manner. "She told me we were not very good persons, you and me."

"You do extrapolate." Noatak has on his face the kind of look a surgeon would have when told by a valet how to properly hold a scalpel. "When was she ever that blunt."

"I believe the exact words were You two aren’t very good persons. Blunt enough for you? Can I finish now?”

His glare doesn’t cause a ripple on Noatak. “Apologies.”

"Well, she did add a whole speech to annul the momentary fluffiness." Tarrlok turns away from Noatak before the subtlest cheer emerges on that face. "At the time neither of us was on anything, I naturally tuned out at most of her words, she every bit as eloquent. But then, the words that stuck: she said despite we weren’t ‘very good’—and there really is no way to accentuate how ingenuous and plain the way she stated something that later turned out to be too ingenuous and plain to polish over—she told me despite that, we were radically different persons. Where it had sounded superfluous from the very beginning, it was indeed the one concrete thing that can be said about us, if you think about it."

Tarrlok waits but this seems to have exhausted whatever Noatak has to say, so he carries on, “She went on about how this difference was what had interested her the very moment she saw the two of us standing next to each other, after the match and before all conversations floated, that between the two of us, you were the one without even the integrity to be the sort of not-very-good person who worries occasionally about being good. It was amazing, she thought, to see someone that comfortable in what he lacked.”

With all the air rushing from him, Tarrlok lets the red spots dance on the fluttering black of his eyelids. More deep breaths, and then: “And you just went ahead proving every bit she said to be true. Now, go ahead and get yourself in the right corner, explaining a narrative in delicate terms, intellectualizing a motive until the cows come home… whatever it is that we both obsessed over and considered ourselves so good at, I’m sick of it. We’re not in one of your rallies, Noa. We were hardly any good at the deals we did choose to plunge ourselves into. In hindsight the moves were so hilariously clumsy. Unprepared.”

Another neutral silence. Noatak’s smile says he’s doing so in spite of himself. Tarrlok says, “You think what you’re doing to the Avatar is any different from what you did to me, from how you did everything? Sure enough, I’m not the most qualified one out there to define the line between solicitously possessive and outright creepy, nor do I have the silver tongue to talk you out of this.”

Noatak hunches, withdrawing his upper torso somehow, and says It would appear so.

"But once more I do feel obligated to be that annoying person to remind you, that this girl has suffered enough, that the world will survive or crumble down with or without your interfering, and by volunteering to be a part of this you’re about to be involved in a series of irreversible events—a matter between two nations, at least from what little I’ve heard… I’m actually talking you into it, am I not?” Receiving a dry chuckle from Noatak. “The Canines know damn well how your muscles flex, Noa, no matter how smooth you make this sound. They got your number. And they won’t blink twice to take sweet advantages of it. But this—” vaguely gesturing at Korra— “this is just plain wrong; you know it, and that I know you know it.” He looks into his brother’s eyes at last. “Shall I continue trying, now, summoning whatever is left of your conscience.”

This may be the first time in decades they stand like this, with full eye-contact and utter privacy. The changes of Noatak’s visage are revelatory: the sheer prettiness has shaded into something calculatedly fine, something Tarrlok knows women will like and had spent so much time annealing himself into. There was a time in their childhood when he was convinced he would grow precisely into his brother’s clean and seamless kind of beauty; the possibility made him cringe, but years later, when he was finished settling into a whole different look, Tarrlok was struck by a faint frustration. Now he finally finds himself with an easy distain for Noatak’s physical characteristics—even with the ones they share. It needs no reasons, this distain. His thin nostrils, his thick and slightly unsymmetrical eyebrows, the way his jaw squares when he grits his teeth, among other details Tarrlok has unconsciously catalogued. And yet, come to think of it, the only things that have truly disturbed him are the pure layers of his brother: Noatak at age seven, at fifteen, at nineteen and forty. It’s hard to keep track and respond to this current one, long haired and clean shaved, in his eyes, the distinctive sparks that belong to either the greatest visionaries or the critically deluded. Either way, the final effect is an unsurpassable ugliness. And Tarrlok finds the natural urge to reconstruct the chain of logic, as people often do when disillusioned: maybe the bizarre visual mutation caused by long stares happens to beautiful things also… maybe it’s the mutual distress that have distorted his vision…

He blinks, looks briefly away and back. No—still a liar, a fraud. Still too ugly.

"You were both right," Noatak says, after a small sniff that indicates no contempt, only confusion. "I’ve been waiting for this to happen for too long, at the same time avoiding regarding any of my failures." Shrugging as if the conversation is about which program to listen to over dinner. "But my whole life has indeed led inexorably to the moment when Korra knocked on the door. I can’t explain this peculiar urge identical to what I’d felt the day we ran away. I did it for me, though, and there you have it. Left home because I was done, and convinced myself it was for us—all the while letting you carry the guilt for two.”

Stay sober. This is but another trick of his. ”So what it this, a cry for help? Surely you can do better than that,” says Tarrlok, reflecting unwillingly that he’s always enjoyed the rare moments of being the Bigger Man. It’s so hard to be Big alone, Bigger however is a hair more reachable. “You know you need help—you know precisely which parts of your mind have festered, better than I do. So what are we achieving here, besides boring each other silly with all this popular psychology garbage?”

The laughter carries generosity. “On a premise that there is something to help me, or stop me, at one point or another. Safe to say we’re both beyond that kind of innocence.” Picking a piece of lint off his shoulder. “If you still can’t tell, the only thing I’m good at is being engaged. It would be a great stretch here to include even the synonyms of Truth, but if you’re bent in a lie and simultaneously bending the very lie… What of it, then? What of the willed lack of lucidity, in the nature of the business you’re engaged in?”

His face impossible to interpret at this moment, Noatak continues, “On the other hand things did change—for once I’m going in blind and see where it takes me.” He casts a look at Korra, his voice gentle without being soft. “Planning, no matter how punctilious, had only taken me so far. And since we all fail, all the time, in this vast, systematic indifference, it may well be refreshing what happens when others redirect you when and how to fail. Someone you trust, if ever fortunate.”

And you trust Ursa, once again, over me.

Gazing somewhere else and exhaling with care, Noatak says, “This life could be any life. Could be anyone’s life. So what if I’m careless—what if I take a step into the dark instead of what I always believed was the exit?”

A long, mutual hesitation hovered above them until Noatak says Talk to me, I can’t tell if you’re still angry.

"Why would I be angry." Tarrlok is a quiet and thinking face. "Just wondering how you managed to make that sound reasonable.”

Noatak flexes his hands, seemingly chilled and unwilling to comment on the chill, and says, “I tried, living like this. Assiduously. In ways we both know he would have abominated—waking up at the same hour and knowing the substance of the next meal… Days too disconnected from everything else to feel real.”

"I suppose time is a relative experience: entirely different for the trapped and the leisured." Tarrlok isn’t sure whether he’s saying this out of pure spite. "Nothing beats waking up resenting a handicapped guy and wishing yourself elsewhere, yes?"

"I gave it my best shot, Tarrlok," he whispers. "Not that I didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s just not—"

"Not in you to do it. Of course."

"Searched within and it’s not there, even though my convictions have been learning how to die since the day I brought you back. At times they still make a grab for me. Pull me down, hold me there. An unpaid debt, otherwise meaningless."

"Not to offend, but I tend to tune out every time I hear that word." "Which one?" "Conviction," Tarrlok says in the most comical way manageable. "Heard it too often running for office, heard it too often later still. Never meant it when I said it, so if you don’t mind: Just exactly what are they, your convictions?”

Noatak looks right into the scars on his face and doesn’t hesitate. “At this juncture? That life wants me, and I, much to my own surprise, want life back.” Again, the near-bovine serenity on his face. “Earlier you condemned me for not letting go. Answer me this, then: How could I.”

Again, Tarrlok tries several times but only manages to murmur the beginning of a word—he has expected another stunt answer regarding something like the abuse of power; then again, an unconscious Korra would have negated the entire point. As Noatak goes on, “I don’t know how the idea has asserted itself and grown to be so mighty—considering how hard it is to live with it in the first place.” As if suddenly shy, looking down and addressing his words to his own shoes. “I’m actually fine with not achieving. Can’t say I did well not letting what drove him drive me in turn, but I gave it a conscious effort.” He makes a noncommittal sound, crouching beside Korra and putting a head on the side of her neck, speaking over Tarrlok’s mild chuckle: “It has to be something beyond the banal fear of death and such. Let’s say it’s about companionship. Or rather, the errors in it.”

Tarrlok looks at both of them and says cheerfully Thank you.

"Don’t be a child, you know what I mean."

Korra’s breathing appears even. More peaceful than Tarrlok’s own. “I should feel sorry to her, no?” he blurts. “Or for her, at least?” It’s easier to believe he understands what’s right from wrong better than Noatak ever would, but in his mind the world has become the map of the world, everything the outline of the thing. He knows how to navigate himself into the right kind of guilt, but cannot find the location. He knows how to talk about morals but cannot sense the shape and temperature of being moral. Is this how his brother feels all the time?

"And you find no such feeling," says Noatak.

Tarrlok mimes incapability, seeing no point in sounding virtuous now. “Tried. The only thing I feel sorry for is how easy it is to feign penitence.”

"The kind of penitence you felt on the boat?"

Tarrlok has yet to find out descriptions for the feeling of wooden fingers on pink facial tissues. Which is touching which. “Can we not…”

"Certainly," says Noatak. This strikes Tarrlok as strangely generous, considering how aggressively he usually pushes the topic, and the fact that this may well be his last chance to stab at it.

"Not afraid to tell you, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this one yet…" His hand still on Korra’s neck as colors return to her cheeks, Noatak looks into the vacuous snow. "Like I said, it’s all companionship, and therein lies the rub: I spent most of my life alone and I haven’t the first idea of how to be alone and well.” Brushing a strand of hair behind her ear as Tarrlok looks away. “I started everything with someone by my side. You, when we first left this place, Ursa, through all things disjointed and painfully fun, and later, my Lieutenant. None of which ended well, I’m aware, but at least it’d all been with someone, in every fetal stage, someone new and committed as I was.”

"To be fare I was never committed as you were in leaving," says Tarrlok, wanting to cut him open somehow, no matter how futilely. "This I didn’t realize right away—it goes without saying we left this place because my fear and your hatred for the persecution of his presence, but my portion of fear was nothing compared to what I came to feel for you."

Noatak doesn’t seem taken aback at all. The way his forehead is ever so slightly scrunched says he is merely absorbing information and adding it to himself.

"For a while his absence was the greater torment," says Tarrlok, shrugging fretfully, "the shadows sniffing and growling every now and then, but soon you proved that your resourcefulness was something to be dreaded with much more intensity. I was stuck with you, for the very same reason I ran away from him. Only by then I was so much more scared that the word fear wouldn’t even suffice. After all, one can eventually wake up from a nightmare, eschew the hulking demons of domestic life, or even overthrow a tyrannical monarch, but how does one begin to outgrow a distorted love?”

Only when Tarrlok has to stop because he no longer detects air around him does he realize Noatak is crying. In an automatic and vanquished manner, as if defending himself from something far more gigantic than Tarrlok can possibly imagine.

This is the second time he has seen tears on Noatak’s face, and he can’t give an account for why any of this is happening, not without Noatak himself narrating through all the years they spent apart. Though it’s clear that both of them are tied up in incommunicable grief for two different sets of memories, some of which surely have overlapped, but the portion is overall too feeble compared to what’s been concealed (purposefully and malignantly, Tarrlok reminds himself). So no, this time he can’t muster enough sympathy to feel sorry.

Still, the tears make him panic—he didn’t mean to make him cry; he didn’t even know his brother was still capable of it. This isn’t the same pattern they’ve always fallen into: he’s used to Noatak rationalizing and himself assuming the angry (righteously!) role. Now Tarrlok strains to simulate a bigger-man expression that should say Neither of us deserves this drama so please, please get a grip, before he realizes Noatak’s face is buried in his hands. Tarrlok sighs and steps up, his good arm stretched out in midair for a few seconds. Then the hand drops. He waits: the crying is so silent, no part of him shakes. No agenda of moving someone with these tears can be discerned.

It comes out of nowhere and doesn’t take long. Noatak looks up from his palms, the world’s whole air hangs here. “I can’t not die for nothing,” he says eventually, barely allowing the last word the credence of its existence. Then, with his eyes closed and his face turned away, softly as if beseeching someone not here:

"Don’t let me not die for nothing."

Tarrlok stares bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of his brother’s profile, and cannot decide if he is revealing real emotions or establishing more excuses. Then he glances at Korra—it’s times like this that he wishes there is an audience of some kind. To help him judge or at least witness what he’s been dealing with in no more than one day. Remaining infuriated is another thing harder to do when alone. He had suffered through all those therapy sessions. All those sessions! If only they were home, Tonja would have calmed him by just being there. That’s the thing about her. She remains unmediated in his anger; they were drawn together under its canopy.

Tonja. All this talking, somehow he’s been refusing to give any thought to the notion that a detail might be hovering around the house at this very moment. An internal shudder. “How much time do I have left?”

"Plenty," Noatak says peacefully but his voice instantly back to business, his face already dry. And it’s a relief, to see his brother is after all mature enough not to seem embarrassed for crying—it would only make things worse. "In fact, I don’t believe the Canines will be focusing on your whereabouts at all, let alone tracking you down," exhorts Noatak. "I’ll tell people you’re leaving for the carnival—speaking of which, at this moment Gaoling in Earth Kingdom seems ideal. Try and think of it as a family vacation, which it is in essence: pleasant weather, more entertainments on an ordinary day than seven Glacier Festivals combined." Cocking his head slightly. "I’ll reach you after things are settled. I have connections there, people we can both trust. This is not permanent."

Tarrlok waves his wooden hand, dismissive. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

"I mean it."

"I don’t care if you meant it. You don’t get to reach us. Do I look stupid enough to head precisely where you point?”

"You’ll be back," says Noatak mildly. "I don’t enjoy the fact any more than you do, but this is home."

"Well, I don’t enjoy it, and it’s not home. Home suggests root of a proper former family and I currently consider myself of having none.”

Noatak says again You will be back, and gives a throaty laugh with what seems to be genuine fondness.

"Oh and," he adds casually, "just for safety’s sake."

A sharp pain on Tarrlok flank and Noatak is beside him. The very air around them must have bulged: a weak noise escapes. The embrace is nothing like a hug. To an untrained eye the transition would seem like mutual support of two wounded soldiers after a lost war. Held there while his upper body slowly slips down against Noatak’s, Tarrlok can only feel his limbs opting out; his breath rises and falls, hard to hear against the roaring thumps of his heart. Noatak’s arm is getting more and more of his weight, the muscles bulging and hardening. He can feel.

"Relax, it’ll only take a second."

The thumb on his forehead is warm and his vision explodes with light. The pain receding is an obscene pleasure as his legs finally give. He makes a blind grab for the only thing substantial, his brother, and feels the hands stop the ground from wafting up. This is what I have always had. This is what I am. The snow around me is mine, the water in the air is mine, the sweat seeping through three layers of clothing is unpleasant and real and mine. The blood inside me—us—is mine. Three bodies. Three thumping hearts. Mine. It turns out until now he has never truly shivered. This time Noatak doesn’t let him fall, he holds him for a few more seconds like that—one hand at the back of his neck, the other pulling him very close—until the sound of breathing refluxes and his legs come back. He lets go.

Tarrlok has rehearsed the day he gets his bending back for so many times, but nothing in even his grimmest experience has prepared him for this, or for the senses shooting through him, carrying sharp edges, newly unraveled and refusing to settle. More than anything they hurt, and more than anything the hurt is sweet. And he hates and loves it so much. It would not keep still and changes shape inside him. His hands on his knees and coughing excessively, entering some other type of detachment. A clearance. He considers bending the snow into some shape—any shape he wants. Instead Tarrlok stays still. Part of him hovers just above, nibbling at his consciousness: This is no longer your part to play. He doesn’t owe this man a thing. He needs to go home and make sure Tonja and Tullik are okay. He wants to hold someone in his arms. Anyone will do. Anyone but him.

"You might want to do something about your face," says Noatak tentatively. "It’s less than ideal for travel."

Tarrlok ignores this entirely. The air stays as if lifted and left there to puncture.

"Just one more thing," he says after some appropriate minutes. "Just let me get this last thing straight."

"Yes, Tarrlok."

"If I had kept my calm in the barn, were you ever going to tell me the truth? If all went well and you managed to bring her to Pakak—you’d just… be gone, again, wouldn’t you?"

Noatak offers a hand, he looks so very tired. “Just go home. I will find you and you will be back.”

"No, no. Do tell." The air is overclear, colors so frighteningly bright something must have caught fire. "This time I volunteer for more of your explanations. So, be that lawyer again: What have you got to sell to your boneheaded client?"

Withdrawing his hand, Noatak buries his face in his palms.

Their time spent together ambient and fading, sharp fila of chills against Tarrlok’s teeth: “It’s alright. Just tell me.”

"I’m sorry."

"What? I can’t hear you."

"I’m sorry."

"Sorry for what you had to do to me, that kind of sorry?" The desire to try bending becomes acute and corporal. Tarrlok slowly gets on one knee; his voice remains unimpressed. "Nice."

"No." With his head lifted and voice full: "I’m sorry."

It’s only that each moment happens twice.

"You think this makes up for what you’ve done?" Tarrlok clenches his fists, the snow under his feet crunching then turning into ice.

"No."

"You think this makes us even?"

"No."

The silence is a hemostat. The unbearable focus ascends by levels. “This was a good life. Built this…” Looking around, Tarrlok puts a palm on the ice. “Built this together.”

Noatak moves his hands down and looks at him, his tears large and proper and running over the hand covering his chin. For a moment Tarrlok considers meeting this distress with his own. Instead he grows harder inside. Which causes the pain, which more poignant—stuck together or torn apart? Not existing until he needs you. Being contingently there when wanted and duped away when cumbersome. A roof. The old roof. A child to educate or rather, reeducate. Canines waiting mindlessly to tear at meat. His absent stare a mirror you can no longer feel or see yourself without. Wearing the mask your face grows to fit. Drawn all the way into his web, depending upon his lie, impotent to speak against it. The face of the mother whose entire existence was a willed translucence being mimicked with perverse genius and chilling precision. So afraid to wake her up as if knowing the truth would have killed her where she stood. Not this, come what may, not ever again. You are the one that survived: thirty years ago the blood inside you had curved down and rightward into a darkness that receded before you and you survived. Nothing like a trance now. Nor does your own voice alter. You’re right here, speaking, coherence is all you have left, your last chance:

"So help me degenerate spirits from all realms." Tarrlok, crying himself now, gets up from where he kneels and faces his brother. "If I didn’t have someone to look after, someone to care about so deeply your rotten heart will never come to comprehend, I’d be spending my last personal breath making sure you pay for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve made me do…"

"Tarrlok…"

"I may not be able to menace you the slightest, not with my contempt, not with bloodbending, not even with my blood—I’m your fucking brother, Noa—" shaking and beginning to loathe himself, for even now, even now… Tarrlok still can’t generate enough spite for the man— "I was supposed be it, I was that one thing… the one thing you had left. And here we are, I’ve got nothing this time, nothing for you, because you never had any to lose, and because I was never equipped for that specific category of hate you feed on. But I’m willing to bet the days of you getting away with it all are not endless. I feel it in my bones: someday, soon, someone able enough will have you duly punished. And I’ll live long enough to see it happen, afar with my family, who will soon enough learn the truth about you. They will not—don’t look away!—will not end up paying the price for your doing without seeing your real color. This is the sole reason for which I’m doing exactly what you want, for the last time. Only it is I who am doing the leaving. I am. I am… I’m the one that abandons you. You depraved piece of shit. I am. You don’t get to do this to me, not anymore.”


	4. A Fire Muzzled

Slow it down there Noa. Can’t practice on it if it’s dead—you know damn well how hard it is to find a mastiff-panther this big at this time of the year… Okay now, slowly, remember how we practiced? Whoa whoa what was that? What did I just say? No need to rush, son, we’ve got all night. Let’s see you loosen up just a bit—good. You have to give her complete attention. The Prey can always tell whether you’re focusing or taunting them with feigned focus. A prey treated with fake attention will never realize this isn’t some silly game you’re playing, this is  _the_  game, here and now, in this spirits-forsaken snowfield, just you and her. I knew you’d understand, that look in your eyes, that bland gaze. I know precisely that look: full possession of something rightfully yours—I knew it Noa, and that’s why I let your brother go to that sleepover this time—at this he’d just spaz out, or else give me that very slow blink of his. Besides it’s a half moon tonight, he can’t do much anyway. You, on the other hand… Gotta start running once walking gets tedious, no?

So where were we? Whoa don’t unclench yet,she’s still awake! Right, right… Now I want you to look at that beast in the eye, this is the crucial moment: these creatures go through pains no smaller than this on a daily basis; if it’s not from you then there’s always something else, and if you think by merely controlling their flesh you get to be the alpha then you’ve got another thinking coming champ. This is what I call the captivating part: the first thing the Prey does is always jerk a little forward and straighten herself up and such—there you go, you see that? See how she cocks her head at just that angle, trying to size you up with just a hint of confusion? And I don’t even have to teach you how to  _look_ , you are doing it already Noa, which proves exactly what I said. Now look, in just this split second shedoesn’t even know that through this posture she’s communicating adesire to yield. That, my son, is what  _defines_  a Prey: you will know one when you see her doing just that: jerking forward with that ridiculous pride-like look. And that’s when you know the hard part is over.

You know I know what I’m talking about. The meat of this game, its entirety, is not so much steering of fluids than watching her empirical maps being erased and redrawn, her ritualistic abdication of power and succumbing to somefaceless authority, some creature so much smaller than she is. Remember this kiddo, the Prey’s response is, from the very beginning, set and sustained, by not how hard the clutch is but the mere fact that it is  _there_. And now the easy part, the part my lad Noa is doubtlessly good at: in this delay where the Prey processes thatwish to surrender, her face slowly declining towards that pinched look of the confined, a delay like this is more than enough for you to put her into an easy sleep.

Now you make sure she doesn’t wake up for about an hour, go ahead—I gotta teach you something new first, we’re talking about next level stuff here. No need to inhibit yourself, Noa, but also not too much. The Body does whatever it’s designed to do, immaculately, but only when initiated by someone who knows the Body like his own. No nonsense. Just somatic economics. So go ahead give her that matter-of-fact amount of effort, feel those quadriceps muscles that allow her full knee-extension and the quietest fastest of movements. Feel them? feel how each fiber does its honest duty to serve a larger purpose? feel how this beast exists in and entirely  _as a Body_? That’s her birthright right there my son, the mastiff, with four rows of those canine teeth that probably have been up to business you don’t want to know. A bodythat’s designed to survive even the nastiest winter. A Body at work, in full reconciliation with itself, son, that’s… that’s some powers working the darkest screeching nights. Appreciate it, then you can further understand why there should be a new set of dictions for the kind of grace you are administering—what do you call an art that governs all other arts?

Trust me when I say no-shit potential has a teleological end in itself. You get better without trying or choosing. I was good, but nothing like this. The day will come when people know me not as Yakone but just as Noatak’s father… Don’t give me that look son, you have no idea, but when it happens I will accept that new name with the kind of bittersweetpride only a father knows, that horrible delight to be. But before that we still have much to do.

Don’t just stand there gimme a hand, son, grab the forelegs, get her over there by the bonfire—can’t have this beauty freeze to death can we? All right on three, easy does it—one, two… shit that’s heavy, okay watch out for the sledbehind you—there you go that’s my boy. Whew, can’t feel my fingers… Now I want you to get my wineskin from that bag… No, no, the one on the left, you’re reaching for the bag with two scrolls in it. That’s all right, grab them too. Right, now get over here and sit by your old man. Sit, sit, closer.

You care to try a sip of this? No? Come on you’re a big boy, you can handle it. I started drinkingjust about your age… Of course back then we didn’t have this, this good stuff, this Rouge Dew, sissy name, though,sounds like a hooker. See but it’s made and sold only in a small Earth Kingdom village near the Republic, and the price is obviously no-joke but damn it’s good stuff. At the very first sip you understand where the name came from. Tastes exactly like that, some velvet red. I don’t drink this much, not these days I… c’mon have some, what’s the big deal. What’s wrong with you… That’s a fella. My child my blood right there.

You’re turning twelve in two weeks Noa. So let’s see… we’ve only been doing this for what, a year? Eleven full moons, the way I count it. You might be wondering why I keep having you and Tarrlok practice the basics every day, no? The same dreary forms you’ve known since seven. No I get it… push and pull, some old crap. No doubt you’re wondering I’m already bending blood what even is the point of all this, huh? huh? Don’t shake your head, I know what I see, don’t be a smart ass Noatak. I’ve noted those little glances you think you so subtly give. Don’t think I can’t notice an attitude when I spot one. No, relax child, I’m not upset—when you anneal a talent like this you’re bound to deal with some quirkiness. One of the reasons I bring you here today is to address this smart-ass problem of yours, and clear it for you once and for all why I do what I do, why it’s so important to repeat. Hand me those scrolls. No, actually, you open it, the one wrapped in grey. Can’t afford to spill—sheesh—careful, Noatak! You don’t treat a scroll in that sort of condition rough all right? That’s right, gently, keep away from the fire.

Now here’s a good one for you: the day I found these scrolls in the attic of my old home back in the south was also the day I discovered what I was capable of—well, there was a silver squirrel-rabbit, let’s just say. I won’t go into details, but it happened before I even opened the other scroll over there,  _Discipline and Punish_ , in which you can pretty much find out everything you need to know about where all  _this_  comes from, in case you ever get curious.

Anyway, that day I woke up discovering my first chest hairs in the shower; the sky overhead was a glossy blue parted by weak threads of clouds moving due north. In a day like this you can just smell discord. South was not the answer, kid, and neither was the north. I was meant to be in the  _center_  of things. And boy they did not exaggerate about the city, it was no illusion. I was there when everything started. Saw the birth of things, Noa, and it was the kind of thrill I dread people your age will never have the chance to feel.

As you probably already knew from the radio, it was right during Katara’s proposal of banning bloodbending altogether that pro-bending started to catch everyone’s attention. A perfect game for a new-born city. The true irony being it was a non-bender’s idea first. Katara’s brother, I think. Purely of the Body, this game, for which there was a kind of unconditioned love I’d never had the change to enunciate or even consider until my bending was stolen. I’m not sure if I was thirteen or fourteen when I started, I only remember having to lie about my age.

The thing was the game was for the young, I’m talking alarmingly young, people starting at the very worst in their late adolescence. The audience would much prefer watching kids under drinking age beat each other up. The first year I joined a team with a name so silly I’m not even going to repeat it. I was happy to just be part of it. And not for long did I realize it was more of a game of in-fighting and back-stabbing between sponsors, and sometimes politicians. As for the contestants, some of them were destined for the Grand Show, endorsing instant noodles and Baiyao ointment, all business. But these were also the first to burn out, chewed and spit out, done. As was the case with my first two teammates.

At a juncture like this boys and men were separated in terms of sobriety. I came through with minimum struggle—while most of my peers burned with hunger for food that didn’t exist, I myself played for the plain irrevocability of things. It was simple: you fight whatever you fight wherever you fight; you give each game all you’ve got and then some. And that was all there was to it. I had no stomach for being a walking billboard, so the second year I switched to freelance contracts, drifting from team to team, less money, sure, but still it was quick cash and I got to play whenever I felt like it. Which was all the time. And get this, throughout my entire career as a pro-bender, I played strictly by the rules—no knocking people off the sides of the ring, no head shots… arguably the rules at that time were much less anal, none of this “no deluge” nonsense. I kept bloodbending all to myself, I was sloppy in that department anyway, tutorless, deterred by not so much as the law as the things I learned from the second scroll… Funny thing, what knowledge can both do to you and for you.

The closest I got to the championship pot was a semi-final match, the very last of my waterbending days… Look at me, mumbling about the good ol’ days as useless fathers everywhere do because they’ve got nothing else to offer, if they’d offered anything at all… The first couple of years in the city I lived on the second floor of this crumbling little colonial building; the apartment had a tiny balcony and a giant hole on the floor. All I had on me was three scrolls. The one I didn’t bring with me today is The Archaeology of Demolishing Reconstruction, you’ll need none of that… a bit too strong for my taste, probably written by some crazed healer who had some unfortunate curiosities for human anatomy.

This next will not seem banal to you, I promise, the things on this untitled grey scroll you’re holding. Everyone knows that bending forms came from martial arts developed from observing animals. In the primal stage of bending there were two major styles, Xingyi and Taiji… well actually there was one more called Bagua but that was adopted by airbenders. Now the traditional forms, the ones you and your brother have been practicing for four years, were broadly practiced by our people as a way to defend and also for its health benefits—the early healers learned the way chi travels internally by practicing Taiji forms, which by the look on your face I assume you already know. Al’right… But I’ll bet no one has ever mentioned Xingyi to you, a style known to a pathetically small percentage of our people. It focuses more on different states of combat, and for whatever reason our people just chose to abandon this more practical and powerful style. Don’t even get me started on that—let’s just say there’s a reason we got our asses kicked by Fire Nation for a full century. You want another sip of this? Nope? Why don’t mind if I do. Go ahead, open that scroll… You’ve got to admit that there’s a certain, well, ferocity, in these states listed. Five Fists they’re called: Chopping, Drilling, Crushing, Crossing, and Exploding.

Ah see now I have your full attention don’t I kiddo. This right here is what I call without the nonsense, a formula designed to not only defend but respond, assuming at least three outcomes of a fight: the constructive, the neutral, and the destructive, the last one being the easiest to visualize and comprehend—that’s where you’ll begin, as I did. Tonight the only thing you need to remember is _The hands don’t leave the heart_. Don’t confuse this with bloodbending. The Five Fists could be applied to answering all of the elements, including water, each in a unique way. This part is just theories. Why don’t we dive into the good stuff? Gotta be cautious, if this baby catches on fire even you wouldn’t be able to do much, kiddo. Wait lemme pull my glove off first… hold this for me. See this… this tiny practitioner I’m pointing at is trying to emulate techniques of twelve animal forms, from goshawks to ostriches to bears? Free very free to mix them up once you get the hang of things, that’s all just technicality. Shit it’s cold… help me put this back on, will you?

Noa you will devour all this in no time, I don’t doubt that one bit, my little practitioner right here. In my second year as a pro-bender I was obsessed with the Xingyi forms. And they worked, of course: no one had seen waterbending like that. And keeping it all to myself was certainly no easy task but I managed to keep my head low. By that time I still didn’t know what I wanted other than pro-bendering, I only knew what I didn’t want. There had always been an intuitive awareness that repute wasn’t an end to anything. It wasn’t even strictly speaking a nice term. I saw people around me either tortured by it or the lack of it, a cage closing in from either side. I still lived in that old apartment, which I bought by the end of the second year, the very first of my properties in the city. I was ensconced. The arena was at that time a very… special place to be, Noa, temporarily I can’t think of another word for such a phenomenon. No one cared about where you came from so long as you gave them a good game—we all stepped onto that foreign land blank. Granted by youth alone the advantage of psyches, we were unfeeling of loneliness, a chest-thumping generation yet to enter fear. In the center of the arena newly built, everything seemed hazy as if by heat. You are in there. High on all of life’s sugar. Unalone.

I made some real stand-up friends, some of them my teammates this time and then came the next game I’d see them on the opposite side of the ring. Noa you get a glance of what a person is really made of by being present. You see yourself in your opponents, your entire body shifting tense, engaged in that few minutes in which you’re not only allowing a dormant element life and motion, but also redirecting the trajectory of what’s coming at you with such a velocity it hisses. The odd part is you don’t feel your own movement to be fast or fierce or whatever kinetic terms shouted out by the narrator. No no. What you experience, intra-game, is that water moves in a way that seems to you slower and clearer than usual, and… larger, if that makes sense. They become cooperative, the elements, not only yours but earth and fire also—somehow there’s always exactly the right amount of time for you to react. It was, in one word, magic.

You know I seldom talk about my days in Republic City, least of all my career as a pro-bender, reminiscing being the first sign of true decaying and all. I only wish someone had smacked me in the head and warned me about the things I disregarded. I was hooked by the novelty, convinced that Xingyi was all that mattered, taking so much pleasure in the sharp bite of perfecting advanced forms that I’d almost forgotten I could bloodbend—to give you a small idea of just how good it will feel. Then came the part where I began to doubt the necessity of Taiji-based forms. And I paid my dues, believe you me, the semi-final… probably not a story for tonight. Back then there’d been no voice over my shoulder telling me that the ability to control the extensions of the Body required extreme regimens, which have apparently been boring the screeching zest out of you and your brother. It’s probably…I should have explained earlier that the “push and pull” is in fact more corporal than elemental. After a certain point it has little to do with water. During this repetitive practice you refine your senses by making adjustments too small to detect, to the point where the Body starts processing what thinking can’t, under circumstances where there’s no room for conscious action. Without knowing you become an operation of movements, the Mind no longer maneuvers and you learn to trust the Body to steer. The opposite of bloodbending, if it helps. It’s ever so slow, this process, but I watch you and I see the changes, Noa—your liking me less is just a price I have to pay. But rest assured I won’t let you make the same mistake by neglecting the fundamental. Do me a favor would you young sir? Explain it to your brother, talk some sense into his little head, but you know, in terms he’d understand… who am I kidding, entirely possible that he’d read all about it somewhere.

To an outsider it may all seem to teeter on the edge of cruelty, pushing you to learn new things—here roll this up—while seemingly holding you back, but you’re not outside of anything, are you kid? Am I asking too much here? … I’m not sure, Noa. It’s becoming increasingly hard to gauge. It’s like that part of me was taken along with my one talent, and I admit sometimes I forget you’re technically still a child. Am I the only one to blame here? I mean look at you. Hard to believe you eat the same meals every other boy does. Not for long you will become a man, the hardest part of which is having to make a conscious effort every now and then to remember just who you are—you have no idea—for the world isn’t of exchanged sob stories and offered handkerchief. Always remember who you are, there’s the sentence I’d never in my most hellacious fantasies thought I’d say. One is to flinch at just how obnoxious it sounds. But still I keep saying to you and Tarrlok all the hackneyed things I wish someone had told me: Toughen up, Be a man… from quote the macho and paternal end. Unwelcome to most, I know. I recognize the nuances, the teeny-weeny eye-rolls. You do realize you’re doing that not because the words themselves don’t make sense but simply because it is I who am saying them.

I’ve had my share of enduring people describing how the absence of parents can mess up a kid, but the fact is there are two kinds of absence, my parents’ was the abstract kind, as in they were never there so I wouldn’t know the first thing about losing them because there was nothing to lose. Wait this is it? This is all the wine you brought? Fine… fine we don’t have much left anyway. I don’t know, maybe I’m been around too much, maybe that’s… we’re always around, me and your mom, who I’m sure has never missed one game of Cuju, no? Not even a real sport, just kicking a ball into an opening… I can imagine how you and Tarrlok have taken our absolute presence and full attention for granted. No matter how loud our voices get we will always seem to you Not There. Pick up your socks, You need a thicker skin for this, Stop giving him wedgies, that’s the furniture talking, it no longer means, Noa, as you grow and grow and grow as if in some grisly haste. A vision I catch myself gawking at from time to time.

Has it only been a year, my son? Apparently it takes exactly eleven full moons for you to get where you are, here and now, sitting not far from a mastiff in her blackest out. Understanding every ridge and trickery of the Body without analyzing, this, this thing I’m not even going to ad…address as gift again is more like a nature to  _locate_ … And I’m sure sooner or later in this not unthreatening evolution of Body you will start to see me less and less of a guide; I’m to shrink entirely into a monotonous voice at the back of your head, meekly tuning itself mute, no?—perhaps already starting? the shrinking and the tuning down? Perhaps only after my total disappearing will you notice my existence, the same goes for your mother, no? It’s all right, really, it’s not that I’m upset. I’m not. That’s just what parents are, not so much as a painting as that sad little pale square on the wall after a painting is removed. Noa I have put up with everyone else’s erasing me in this crisscrossedly fucked world. I dealt with that, handsomely I might add. There is now a blank truce between me and what happened sixteen years ago.

To think one day my own son is to forget the person from whom he’d learned everything I mean Everything in the first place… not to you I’m not lying, not once did I do that, but really, do you get it, Noa? Do you know how unrecognizable it all gets? All these conscious unconscious minutes in which more and more of you impatiently unfolds? Of course you don’t. Things just throw themselves upon you more ferociously than I’d ever expected. This clinical arrghtistry. A blank verse in motion. And that ig-inorganic stare you mindlessly employ when accepting the Prey’s ceded power, fucking… radiating command…You haven’t even set one step outside this puny gooey part of the world and I daresay the world is yours and you will get bored, by the sheer distance between you and what it has to offer. You haven’t the faintest idea of that howling trep…ugh…trepidation, that one may well move around the world without being seen at all…

I should be embarrassed now, shouldn’t I? My ungainliness, my red ugly mug, my name new and worse everyday on strange tongues, my face inexplicable nonrefundable, each morning—do you know what it’s like to  _realize_  your own face every single day Noa. You and your brother and your mother have never once seen what I truly look like, so how much difference would it make, when I tell you that each day I see you grow to resemble my real face just a little bit more. A little bit more… And yet I’m further and further away from it. Trapped in this worthless body. I’d so stupidly assumed that losing your mind meant that at least you wouldn’t be aware of it. I’d pictured being angry as saying what you meant and knowing exactly why you’re angry. I should have felt ever so sorry after each full moon when we went home and you just gives me specifically this this near-raphe part of the back of your head and goes with your brother into the bathroom so I’m guessing as to properly clean the wrinkleless fingers of yours? How about you look at me when I speak to you Noatak? or I’m to prop-propitiate some more is that the new deal now, young man? How about instead of giving me the very back of your head every fucking living chance you get you try and see me with due respect as Father and not some desiccated skyscraper-gawking tree, webbed in a triangular horror after nightly sit-ups, staring at the faces in the walls, realizing his own, a man with neutered dreams and maimed visions and perhaps not that much potential to have pissed away in the first place? How about that. Now come on let’s see you wake up that beast while you sit here all rigor mortis with your hands on your knees and that bovine look in your eyes lowered and fixed on who fucking knows what, let’s see what you’ve got.

/*/

Korra?

No please… I don’t want to—

Korra, wake up.

No please… let go…

It’s all right, Korra. Look at me: you are safe.

What?

Hey, hey. It’s okay now. Do you need anything?

Water...

Here. How are you feeling?

How long was I out?

It’s around midnight—I’d say roughly ten hours.

…

How are you feeling? Are you all right?

Why would I… Did you kill it? Did he make you kill it?

Kill what? What are you talking about?

Your father, he made you…

You’re burning. Lie down. Here, drink all of it… I heard you screaming earlier, so I came to check on you. My father, did you just say? You saw him in the spirit world?

No… no it definitely wasn’t the spirit world. I was… _you_.

Pardon?

He just wouldn’t stop drinking—his face was entirely different from the last time I saw him in my vision. But that voice… And all these talks about pro-bending. I didn’t know you learned Xingyi, from the same scroll I did!

That’s… what?

I found the same scrolls back when I was training in the South. But in this… whatever it was, I was you! They were obviously your memories!

That’s impossible.

Well then how come I know he was wearing the ugliest grayish-brown gloves? I wanted to say something to him, but there was this… this lump in my chest, and the worst part was I _understood_ everything he said, I _saw_ his sadness, and the more I understood the sadder I got too, and the more unlikely it was for me to say anything. And those scrolls… where did he get those scrolls?

…

Well don’t just stare at me like that, say something!

I don’t understand. This is not supposed to happen, not in this way.

What do you mean in _this_ way?

Nothing, nothing, it’s the bloodbending’s doing…

How is that even possible?

It’s… better if we talk about it in the morning. It’s been a long day, you need more rest.

No, we are talking about it now! That talk actually happened, clearly! But why am _I_ reliving your memories?

Calm down—

Don’t tell me to calm down, don’t you ever tell me to calm down—

Korra, Korra look at me! I’m as surprised as you are.

Oh _believe me_ , no one is as surprised as I am. Who do you think I am, Tarrlok? I don’t need your sorries, I want to know what on earth is happening to me!

It’s… I never saw it coming, it’s never happened the other way around before…

The other way around?

Sometimes…seldom, really, this, transference, interchange… I don’t know the exact term for it—it happens. But it’s always been the other way around.

Tell me it does not mean that you can get in another person’s head the way I just did yours. 

Passing memories, more like. Never specific, there’s no details or context to speak of, it’s more like flashes and stabs of… being. And it’s only happened _during_ the bloodbending, never after…

Well that was anything but brief. Holy shit that man could talk.

That I’m afraid is true. How long did it last?

Wait, wait, hold on—so you’ve been inside _my_ head before?

…

Oh _no_ , oh shit!

Korra, please—

And it never occurred to you to—I don’t know—maybe tell me about it?

That’s not—it happened a long time ago, back in the city, in the arena… I didn’t expect it to happen when the bending is under control.

Exactly what part of this whole situation do you think is under control?

You’re right; it’s way more complicated than I thought it would be.

You _think_? And, and what did you see, in my head? Don’t bother lying again!

Like I said, they were only bits and small collections of images and sounds and feelings—

You just defined the word memory.

I know, please let me finish. It wasn’t so much as your memories as your… predecessor’s

You mean _Aang_?

Not Avatar Aang, judging by the dragon and the volcano, I think it was a firebender—

 

What the—Roku? Great, I can’t even connect with Aang no matter how hard I try, and you’re inside _Roku’s_ head. That’s just terrific—

It wasn’t intentional. Please, Korra, if you could just sit back down…

And there I was, still trying to process Tarrlok’s little speech, as if I haven’t got enough problems of my own… Why did I ever think this would be a good idea… That’s it, I’m gone. Come on, move your ass.

It’s the middle of the night, where are you going?

Up to the valley of none of your business. Open those curtains and get out of my way.

Get off of me.

Korra, my brother’s gone.

What, you killed him?

No, _Korra_ , I did not _kill_ my brother. We had a talk after we confirmed your life wasn’t in danger. He went home early to get Tonja and Tullik, and they’re on their way to the carnival in Pakak now. I stayed where you fainted to give you a brief healing session. When I took you home, they were already gone.

I thought the carnival wasn’t for another five days.

Yes. But we decided it wouldn’t be wise for all of us to share a roof after what happened.

We decided, or you decided?

It was actually his idea. He felt very guilty, thought your collapsing was because of him. I assured him that wasn’t the case. You heard him when he said his company was only to make sure things didn’t get out of hand, so you can imagine how terrible he must have felt after being the first one to lose control.

So he just… ran away, when things got awkward… Wonder where he learned _that_ from.

Fair enough.

Oh well, sorry about your childhood. See ya!

Please, Korra, you’re still in shock and not thinking clearly. At least wait until your full recovery.

Look me in the eye and see how clearly I’m thinking. Get, your hand, off of me. I will bite you again if I had to.

Clear thinking, I can see that.

Go ahead, make one more witty comment, see what happens.

Please, take a moment before you walk away, please.

What, you’re not big on walking away from things now? Or are you just not a big fan when others do this to you?

I understand you’re mad at me.

Right, and sure I’d be the only person in the world who feels that way.

I know it has been too much for you, I know, and I’m sorry. But we can figure out a solution, you have to trust me.

And now he wants to figure things out. Well too bad there’s nothing to figure out. All seems pretty simple to me. All this lying, I’m just sick of it. Now move your hand or it’s coming off.

Don’t you want to get to the bottom of it? Aren’t you curious why this would happen? And the color of your fire?

Nope not really. Weird shit happens all the time, people shoot fire out of their foreheads and eye sockets and shoe laces, I think I can live with some blue fire. And just so you know, I’ve been very clear from the beginning that I want none of your wacky family business. It’s just none of my concern, all right? Can I go now?

We both know that’s not true. I remember asking you loud and clear if you feel certain to get involved.

Oh aren’t you the memory king. If I knew this is what you meant by getting involved I would’ve thrown a dictionary at your head. I said yes as in I wanted to learn how to resist bloodbending, not… whatever this is!

This is what involved means, Korra. It’s never just bending.

So now you’re also committed to things?

How much more of this do I have to take?

Since I’m leaving apparently that’d be the last one. Hope you enjoy the aftertaste. Come on, out of my way.

Korra, please.

Don’t, touch, me.

…

And don’t give me that look. You know what? Don’t look at me at all.

You do think I’m a monster.

First, that’d be incredibly insulting to monsters everywhere. And you really shouldn’t be allowed any eye contact with anybody. That’s… aren’t you like fifty five or something?

I’m forty-three.

Big difference. Move over, stupid big… tree. I’m done with this—get… what are you doing? The fuck are you doing. Hey, hey get up, that’s… okay seriously, oh that’s not fucked up, that’s mature. Come on, get up, so this is my life now… dude you’re forty-three, please. Arms off my waist. Knees off the floor. Get, up.

…

What did you say?

…

Wait are you crying? Oh that’s… wow. Nice. On the count of three I will be kicking your crotch again. Haven’t forgotten how that felt, have we? One. Okay now I’m just embarrassed for you. Two? Am I seriously still coun—

Just tell me what to do.

What?

I said tell me what to do. What should I do, right now. Tell me what I can do.

Nothing, alright? No, thing. In case you haven’t noticed, this day has been  _weird_.

I know.

And you people are weird individuals!

I know.

And you… you talk and walk weird and… have a weird face!

If you say so.

You’re not a good or decent person, okay? It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that no one has ever clearly stated that to you. You did some truly,  _truly_  awful things.

That’s true.

For the longest time I didn’t want to admit this to myself, and I know maybe some of it wasn’t your fault. But you did them. Do you have any idea how many people hate your guts? want you dead? Do you even care? And don’t bother answering that if you’re just gonna lie some more!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I keep trying to defend you, excuse you, round you up as this… whole other person. To  _everyone_. Well, mainly to myself. But—

I appreciate that.

Do not interrupt me! You know how people always say ‘Just because he’s done bad things doesn’t mean he’s a bad person?’ Well Noatak I don’t think that applies to your situation. I don’t know… I think maybe you’re just… bad. But not worse than bad, not like evil, you’re just…

No, worse than that. That sounds more like Tarrlok. Speaking of which, you’ve got to admit you’re the worst big brother ever. You two actually make me feel lucky that I don’t have siblings.

That I am.

As for you… you’re just really fucked up, as a human.

You  _ruin_  things. You have this wish or at least a solid streak to ruin them.

…

Can you stop mumbling into my stomach now? Can we pretend to converse like normal humans? Here, take this, do something about your face… So, that’s your move, you just… kneel, and weep, to keep someone from leaving? That’s really dignified. Does that always work?

Unprecedented behavior on my part, but there’s a first time to everything, I suppose.

You look ridiculous. That was not a good moment for you. Or a good look.

But you are less mad at me now.

I don’t think I was ever mad at you. I’m freaked out by you. I don’t know what to do with you. You are truly the worst thing that’s happened to me.

Sorry.

Stop apologizing. You people are even more insufferable when you get apologetic.

I’m getting very good at it.

So what do we do now? Sit in this empty house and cry until the cows come home?

Are you hungry?

That zucchini bread?

Yes, I thought you might be hungry when you wake up. Here.

Now would be a good time to explain all that sobbing.

I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean to disturb your further with my discomposure.

There are always episodes like that? I mean those were some real tears. I still can’t believe it. Just, ready, set, cry… How you managed to get a bunch of underground fire-eaters following you, I’ll never understand.

I’m clearly already mortified. Can we please change the subject?

You really can’t stand being alone, can you?

Funnily enough, I’ve spent most of my life alone. But the idea of being in this house, now, all by myself… it just felt rather overwhelming at the moment.

No shit. So, a radically lonely and emotional, Equalist leader.

How’s that for a propaganda poster.

Or maybe you’re simply weak. Like me.

I don’t think you’re weak. Although it was a rather remarkable amount of tears shed for one day. You still haven’t answered me—how are you feeling now?

Like a grown-ass man just held and cried into my body? What do  _you_  think? At least my arm doesn’t hurt anymore, so there. What  _was_  all that, anyway? Why did it get so out of hand this time?

Speaking physically, sometimes the body will just… give up, without a single sign, and leave the rest of you wandering. I thought if I went easy on the grip then the damage would be minimal. I did not see this coming.

But how could it just give up on me? I’ve been training for fifteen years.

Still. It’s a human body. Meat wrapped in a flimsy stocking.

Oh great, that’s poetic. Is that what we all look like to you? Piles of meat walking around.

I was simply stating the fact. And that’s not at all what you look like to me.

… Did you at least work things out with Tarrlok? Tell me  _one_  thing about this day that doesn’t completely blows.

Working things out would be a stretch, but he made his departure in peace.

You mean chickening out in peace.

You have to understand just how sorry he was, how exposed he must have felt under the circumstance. In a strange way, it would take quite a bit of courage to reveal that kind of vulnerability.

Look who’s all sensitive and big-brotherly now. I wonder who pushed him into full frontal crazy in the first place.

I may deserve that. But Korra, don’t forget he also has a family now. He has people to protect. Though I believe Tonja would feel sorry you couldn’t accompany them to the carnival or at least say goodbye.

So he’s just gonna keep lying to her about, well, everything?

It would seem so.

Isn’t this exactly what happened with your parents? Why can’t you people just… tell the truth. She would understand.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly what happened to my parents, but yes, I fully understand the irony of the situation. It’s… for the best, that she doesn’t know.

 _How_? Why does everything have to be this huge secret with you guys? Is there some sort of essential fun about lying your ass off that I’m missing out on?

Here, slow down, have some water. Korra, I’m sure after witnessing what happened earlier with my brother, you should know that sometimes words that are meant to express will only invoke.

Why am I still talking to you—of course it would! That’s part of the deal—it’s not a small thing to handle but it’s not impossible…  _Hey what’s for dinner? I made soup, oh by the way I’m a bloodbender and my father was_ _a somewhat_ _evil_ _person. But he’s dead now so_ _let’s_ _move on with our lives… Cool?_  Don’t you see the problem already? You keep all these secrets and you cover one lie with another, until there’s just nothing real left in your life. Is that what you want? After all that has happened?

It’s a bit more complex than that, Korra.

Don’t say my name like that, like I’m some disappointing child. I hate it when people do that. And you know it’s not that complicated. Surelyyou two must be the only people in the whole world who had an awful Dad, the only people who have made unfortunatechoices in their lives. Big whoop!Tarrlok said so himself, some self-diagnosed manpain, this is—do you want to live the rest of your life loving what is still there for you to hold on, or do you want to keep on with this pity parade for no one?

And where precisely was all this wisdom when you were trying to weasel out of your own predicament?

I may be under the weather. Doesn’t mean I can’t kick your ass still.

I’m not mocking you. You’re a constant surprise. I only wish you’d have more of this faith in yourself, really.

Faith, you say? Well let’s see…there’s the crazy ass blue fire;  _you_  have probably seen Avatar Aang more than I have. I’m pretty  _faithful_  that all my friends are scared shitless by my very existence but doing a terrific job hiding it. There are currently who knows how many bloodbenders in the city for me to deal with—sure you’ve seen what wonderful progress I’ve made in that area. All these could be a piece of cake if I was able just go into the Avatar State freely, but whenever I do glow up I’d start killing people, as in… making them stop living, Noatak… If any one of these problems can be solved by honesty, or friendship bracelets, or having faith in myself, I’d instantly become the sweetest person you’ve ever met like you wouldn’t believe. And yet it doesn’t work quite like that, does it?

… I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.

There’s nothing left to say.

But you must have so many questions right now.

I don’t think you have the answers to them. And even if you do I wouldn’t count on you to give them to me in honesty. I’ve made too many mistakes trusting you. I just don’t learn.

Well then, I wouldn’t expect to earn that trust back soon. But if ever you get curious.

That’s what you dad said… Sorry, that sounds awful, I mean he… that’s actually what he said, earlier…

I know. It’s all right. My brother was perhaps right: some complexes are better accepted. I’m sorry you had to see all this.

I do have one question for now.

Yes?

Did you kill it, the mastiff?

No. Come to think of it, we didn’t kill animals, not with bloodbending—still, they were hunting trips. Wouldn’t be convincing coming home empty-handed.

That doesn’t make it any less terrible, though.

No, it doesn’t.

I feel dizzy. Who would have thought being dragged into someone else’s head could be so overwhelming.

Get more rest. I’ll put a bucket by the bed in case you feel sick again.

Noatak?

Yes?

What are we going to do next?

Well, the bloodbending must stop, that’s for sure.

But—

Please don’t argue with me on that.

You don’t know—I mean what if—

I said _no_ , and I don’t expect any more push back from you. We’ll figure something out tomorrow. For now, just get some sleep. I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.

What if those… scenes, come back again?

…

Noatak?

I don’t know… I—I really don’t know.

Make fists with my feet?

That’d be a start.

Then maybe kick his ass? I know that’s unlikely—but if I could?

Sounds like a plan. Good night.

… Hey.

Yes?

The hands don’t leave the heart. I think we’re gonna be just fine.

/*/

Two hours later. Korra sits up in a jolt. She stays on the bed, counting the brown objects in Noatak’s bedroom. She gets twelve, book covers not included. She’s the two hundred and eighty-sixth Avatar, she’s told. She has killed thirty six people, partners included. She opens the curtains: the night is under a sloppy dominance of the sun. She sits back on the bed, focusing breathing on Dantian and failing the rhythm. She opens his closet. The word triangular keeps shooting back and forth through her head, a long-unwashed tableau—Yakone keeps looking down at his pedant watch and coughs unseasily into his glove, Noatak is rolling up the scroll in an impeccable filial piety, and the mastiff’s subconjunctival hemorrhage is a dewy red full and viscous against the snow, its mouth extended but not in a genuine way, it seems, more like a veteran agony practiced for the grand show, the blood invited goes Wosh wosh hush. A celiac voice is saying The Body is a writing utensil. Someone on the wall has suggested If you see a sea of fire, plunge into it. She picks a shirt, and opens her own luggage.

A few weeks ago, while packing, Avatar Korra decided to bring two brassieres with snaps in the front—her eighteenth birthday gift from Asami, as a joke, Korra had thought—she does not know why, nor has she ever worn them before sneaking out of the compound. She stares at them in turn with a silent ferocity people save only for things that will never return. It takes her quite some time in the bathroom to take the bindings off. The hardwood stairs are cold against her bare feet. She has buttoned his shirt all the way to the top.

On the living room couch he appears sound asleep. She looks down at him and then at herself, the awareness that she is in here becoming a whole new kind of awareness. She’s realizing how she’s standing and how chilling the air is between her bare legs and how absurd this would look through a window. In her head Dad is putting a hand on Mom’s shoulder, Bolin talking to Asami in his bright and earthly way, their faces in and out of focus but all seem somewhat glad that she isn’t there.

It isn’t even her decision to kneel beside him, it’s simply the weight on her back, another treachery of her body she is certainly getting used to. Still, after all this time, there is more power to it than she could ever expect. All history present: between his eyebrows she can tell the lines from aging are yet to catch up with those of frequent frowning. His chest barely heaves; unlike her, even in his sleep he is breathing correctly. She wonders if he also dreams every night and if so, how many faces he’d have to face per dream. In the near-light of the living room, a thread of decent sunlight, bent by time, falls pliably off his earlobe and lands on his neck, where she spots a bite mark, faint and persistent near his ear.

So there it is, the scar, not going anywhere, she can’t decide if it’s because he left it that way or because things just stop healing at a certain age. This is not desire, she bends over with a languidness she knows isn’t necessary but seems right now intensely meaningful. Then presses her lips, softly this time, on the spot. There could be no mistaking in what she’s doing now. She pauses for a beat in which everything hangs there and then feels a hand on her arm. No room to back off. She puts her free hand around the other side of his neck. He slowly sits up and takes her chin in his right hand—she knows he isn’t dextral—to kiss her like it’s something they have long ago agreed upon, and by the time he eases her onto the couch her tears are running into both ears, a spot on her neck where he is less kissing than grazing with his stubble hurting to no small degree. She can try, for even just a second, to imagine what is going on inside his head—she just doesn’t want to.

Whereupon their lips glue so tight he has fully become her breath, the only sound in the room. She’s embarrassed not because of the tiny noises she’s making but because she is the only one making them. So she pulls him close until no light can shine between them, hooking her fingers over the ridges of muscles along his spine as if she’s offended by his not being as responsive—considering just how painfully easy, even for her, to administer affection in this sort of situation. But it’s too hard to break the focus. She can see him this time. And in his eyes, an extrorse avidity.

This she does recognize. But no way he’d hurt her this time. He wouldn’t dare.

His touch, though, is somewhat less than it had been when he had the mask on. It feels… neutral. Or maybe it’s me, she thinks, maybe I’ve been the problem all this time. Really there can’t be a worse time to also realize that the words she can’t usually utter without quoting or grimacing represent the parts of her that are probably already exhausted before they even get the chance to be felt. Ensuing are tiny stabs of logic: if you haven’t felt something for this long then you just have to consider the possibility you’ve lost it; that certain capacities you don’t deserve simply fall off of you like dead skin off cuticles.

But it is also the logic by which instincts despise logic. Does it even matter who’s the supplicant now? She presses her tongue against the scar that now seems a legacy, and squeezes her legs to take him in even deeper, harvesting the details of him by filling her hands with his hair, arching her back into his embrace. He whispers a question to her. No, it’s not, she says pulling back a little and unbending her legs, her eyes not leaving the middle distance between him and the ceiling, just make it stop.

It feels so close to desire, and is not. It’s about a certain moment that she can be thoroughly convinced she is what he sees and he all she is seeing; that a voice in him must be vacuumed of everything but her; that it is possible to make a home out of someone (both on the floor now, the clasp of her bra knocking on the floor, again and again, a tiny blunt sound). That she must, as always, play both offense and defense just so she won’t dissolve into the bolster inside her that’s been supporting something heavier than her. That he might have only been a name. That it is all right to just be a name. That she needs his fear and closeness and recognition and condescension, all at once, to fill up some parts of her while starving the rest. That he is an instrument by which she can execute compassion and selfishness at the same time as she finally shuts her eyes at the sight of his, shutting him out, her hand covering the hand covering hers as if pushing her under a sepia surface right before ladling her back up and serving her to something gigantic. After she cleans herself up with his shirt, Korra touches the floor with her knuckles, wondering if there’s blood even though there is no reason. When she stands up, he puts a hand around her ankle, so insignificantly. She instantly knows what he’s about to ask. But before she can answer, he lets go without a word. It’s harder to leave his perimeter now—her legs are not exactly what they once were. She goes back upstairs, not really sure if she is still awake, just like three years ago. Because what older people are trite and true about, she thinks lying there staring at the finally faceless ceiling, is that you will make the same mistakes over and over again without engineering towards them. Sleep comes like a mist numbing her flank. His heat is fading away, but when she closes her eyes she can still feel his contour echoing hers, and this constancy alone grants her rest.

 

/*/

 

Some hours after Korra’s gone back upstairs, Noatak sits up on the couch, then walks outside with a blanket wrapped around him, as a man does at some point. With the solstice closer to the end, the sun is less of a bully at dawn. Clouds look absentminded in covering the greyblue, stars faint. He was eight, maybe. Possibly. Stepping out of one of Laniq’s slumber parties Mother seemed so bent on having them both be part of. And always, always he’d have to talk to Tarrlok all the way home because the kid was too afraid of a single moment of silence, or the night in general. Or both. The Grand Hunter would hang obvious overhead. Noatak would point the guy out for his brother, and the Twin Canines that protect their heroic master, heroically. (Together the three of them form the most splendid triangle in the winter sky, was something Noatak would leave out of their conversation.)

His first time on an airship with Hiroshi Sato, as they were crossing the southern border of the Earth Kingdom, Sato pointed at a river below, and asked him if he could estimate its width just by looking at it from three hundred meters above sea level. It didn’t feel like a real question, so Amon let him go ahead and show off, because at the time his idea of indulging small talk was to not. Though it did bring him to certain readings later. He learned that the Grand Hunter was actually called Orion and the Wooden Star in the old folktales, Jupiter. There is such a way of addressing things, apparently. He learned to like it, weaned himself off the old terms and a few years later, when Sato talked about the time he spotted the Southern Cross while flying his first aircraft over an ancient battlefield in the Fire Nation, Amon engaged in and, to his own surprise, enjoyed the conversation. He could imagine the kind of majesty Hiroshi must have beheld in the untainted dark sky: it’s of no reason that the stars exist, secure in their identity. A thing true and essential on its own terms. And against unfathomable odds, a constellation relentlessly pointing true south for man to appreciate its being at work.

That he can barely feel his hands is now a dull fact. The moon currently nowhere to be found, something spectacular is happening in the west instead and it outshines pretty much everything in that direction. Noatak suspects Castor. (It was such a short distance from Laniq’s home to theirs it was ridiculous.) He’d make fun of Tarrlok for being chicken, a lot, but would go ahead and fill all potential silences anyway. Then came the time when Noatak had to walk that path alone, and he was scared senseless by the sound of his own footsteps. He’d start running, and the faster he ran the harder his feet slapped the ground so he had to run even faster, until there was no real sound other than the blank terror of his footsteps and his own breathing waxing and waning totally out of true dimensions.

Something gargantuan and slow and very much of its own.

It just seemed easier to outrun his own steps in an archetypal horror, than to admit he was no better than his brother.

It also seems that once more he’s driven Tarrlok away with the truth. There’s also no way of knowing if he is, as told, running to safety, wherever that is. It worries Noatak, sure, but all things considered, it could have gone worse. This time he knows too much about himself to subject Tarrlok to chaos, where ethics and sentimentality—or whatever disease a family man carries—will get in the way of simply surviving. He also knows Tarrlok well enough to be sure that he won’t stay mad and will come back eventually. However much hair serum he puts on, Tarrlok doesn’t change.

Noatak reassures himself that he’s made the best choice for everyone and is still in alignment with his original plan of—well, what exactly? Hard to say now. It’s precisely because things are all of a sudden happening for him that he needs to stay extra calm and patient. And surely, if right now he keeps concentrating on constellations or Sato’s stories or what a little shit Tarrlok has been, he won’t have to deal with Korra’s smell on the blanket, won’t have time to think about how she was just now tracing all of his real scars with her lips; or how her fingers would find his no matter where they were, what they were up to; or why she didn’t give him a chance to administer his caring side afterward—not that he needed to, but at least it would have made him feel better about it all, leave her to feel better about it all, wouldn’t it? It doesn’t seem she needs his assurance, or him, for that matter. Unlike three years ago, this time it feels… she’s had him somewhat figured out. No, that sounds absurd. It’s Korra. She may have taken something away from him in the past few days (her access to bits of his childhood memory was certainly not expected), but no doubt he’s taken way more from her. After all the calamity of their past, she is still here. That alone grants him leverage against—well, again he has no idea what. But if a little bit of truth is what it takes to keep her around, so be it. There’s no way she has enough strength to leave him now.

To erase the tactile memories of last night, Noatak searches for Orion again, which would normally guard his way home, one stupid kid or two, but all he finds in the east is Ursa Major. Great. Where is Draco—well, there it is, coiling up between the Bears, so faint at the moment not even the head is fully distinguishable. He follows its jawline and manages to spot Vega, who blinks at him in her irritating brightness.

_How fascinating that the things you see at this moment are no longer the same in their own realities, let’s focus on that._

There really cannot be a worse time to realize how badly (and embarrassingly quickly) he wants Korra again.

Noatak looks up to the eave and takes off the blanket. Bed-haired, unshaved, post-coital. This can’t be a good image of him. But fuck it. He needs distraction. Needs information. A next move.

“You can come down now,” he says flatly.

Some of the longest, quietest seconds ensue. A maroon thing lands in front of him in perfect silence.

Evidently he’s made a bad first move: as the woman turns to face him it becomes impossible to ignore how slow her heart rate is.

“A pleasure to meet you, Noatak,” she says with no hint of pleasure. She removes the mask covering the bottom half of her face.

A girl, technically, not much older than Korra, not much shorter than him. There’s just enough distance between them that he can’t make out the color of her eyes.

Her voice reminds him of something persevered in a cellar. Not so much old as aware of its own value.

And that face. Less outright beauty than careful precision. Even the beauty mark under her right eye seems carefully _placed_. As if whoever designed that face realized at the last second that it's too meticulously perfect, almost machine-like. 

Noatak makes an attempt at clearing his throat.

“Ursa sent someone new, I see.” Can she tell how nervous he is, or how badly he wants to use bloodbending, just to show her he _can_? “What happened to the other two operatives?” 

“One-person job.” She looks around the porch the way a sanitation inspector would restaurant kitchens, and then finally, at Noatak, who is by now almost touched by the splendor of her physique. “The Avatar is still asleep?”

He isn’t sure if there’s a twitch on his face. He decides not to think about how much of what happened earlier she has seen.

 _Well, she works for_ Ursa _—of course she saw everything._

Fine, so maybe he should have said no when he woke up to the warmth of Korra’s breath behind his ear. He blames the Avatar. Apparently her not thinking anything through is not only effective, but _contagious_.

There is no time for shame. By the way he is being scrutinized right now, there’s also no way of skirting the fact that he has become an easy prey for just about anyone, anywhere.

“You tell me.” Noatak assumes his best philanderer voice, with a smile so stiff he can feel in his neck.

It worked. The girl looks away. In the cold it looks like she’s letting out an impossibly long, steady drag of smoke through her thin nostrils.

When was the last time he had a smoke? 

When she looks back there’s a small but definite contempt in her eyes. Like Noatak is an inconvenient insect she’s about to remove, or play with first. It seems almost unprofessional.

She studies his face, his crossed arms, then says, “I can see you thinking about it.” She sticks out her own arms as if waiting to be handcuffed. “Go ahead, give it a try.”

“What do you mean?” 

She rolls her eyes ever so slightly, but just evident enough for him to notice. It kind of gives away her real age. Why do young women always roll their eyes at him like this? Can they spot something fundamentally pathetic in him, or in just about anything?

“Don’t play dumb,” she says and adjusts her fingerless gloves. “Come on, try bloodbending me, if you can.”

Noatak exhales through his teeth. “And why on earth would I do that?”

The moment he hears his own voice, something lurches inside him. The inhuman rate of her heartbeat, her demeanor, the contempt she seems to hold for this entire situation… It all adds up to the same horrible possibility. The girl sighs, and then confirms his worry with the kind of patience one exercises while addressing a child. “I know you wouldn’t be silly enough to physically fight me, win or lose, that’s just a bad message to send. But it’s so obviously bothering you it’s getting pitiful. So let’s just get it over with, shall we?”

Stupid little fuck. Doesn’t even bother to hide her face like the rest of her associates… What happened to professional courtesy? What message is Ursa trying to send him—and more importantly—how did he get to this point?

The last time he felt actual fear, he was slicing open United Republic waters with an Avatar in proper Avatar State chasing after him. That’s it. He’s done feeling inferior around women half his age. You asked for it, all of you. Noatak unfolds his arm and focuses on whatever mass of humanity in front of him: the unusually strong blood flow notwithstanding, it’s still just flesh, everything in place, doing what it does.

And when he demands her wrists, nothing answers.

It’s more or less what he’s expected. And certainly what she invites him to see. The comedy of how much bloodbending he’s exerted in the past five days catches up with him, as each discovery of this girl’s perfect physicality adds fuel to his shame. Taking a slow, fortifying breath, Noatak shifts a little to give the grip more attention. Then his full attention. Nothing. Everything inside her holds position.

Such contempt.

The first thing striking him is that if Korra learns about this, he’d become absolutely useless to her. Surprised by where his mind goes first, Noatak tells himself to sort out the priorities. To his previous knowledge, there are two, maybe three people in the world who know how to fight bloodbending with elaborate self-chi-blocking techniques. It requires also stupendous endurance of pain, all for an immunity that lasts for no more than an hour.

Which is still more than enough time in real battle.

The anger is autonomous and there’s no stopping it.  _Ursa. Ursa… What have you done to my legacy?_  The thought that this girl has been chi-blocking herself every hour in the last few days makes Noatak bristle. Maybe he’s still quick enough to block her other chi-points, if push comes to shove. But so far she’s given him no reason to fight. He was the one calling her down the roof. He was the one bloodbending by request—

A spot between his eyebrows is starting to ache. Again, that strange urge to wake up Korra—just the sight of her will probably make him feel better or, at least, less alone.

Noatak quickly acknowledges the stupidity of the thought. “Very impressive,” he says as jadedly as he can. “Now if you’re done flexing, shall we get down to real business?”

“Is that the way to greet guests in the north?” She steps closer as he backs away. “It’s freezing out here.”

“First, you’re no guest of mine. And I should assume you’ve gotten used to the weather by now.”

“Not really. Where I grew up, people take control of how they live, and that includes the temperature.” She keeps closing in until he’s backed up against the door. He feels the radiance of her approaching, the patent warmth of someone younger. Her mask has left a faint line running horizontally across her face, cutting right under the beauty mark. 

"I will not further cooperate until I know for sure my brother and his family will not be followed or in danger."

She chuckles. "You are better than this." Her eyes are the color of moss in abandoned air temples. "Are you really that desperate, or are you simply stupid enough to believe you're in a position to negotiate."

Barely looking over her head, Noatak watches the clouds occult a constellation he doesn’t recognize.

“There’s no way I’d let you in my house,” he says. “We will talk out here.”

She chuckles and reaches behind him for the doorknob. Even though Noatak is sure that by now she already knows from the number of plates in the cupboard, to the pattern of the bathroom walls, somehow it seems crucial to hold this last stand. He reaches back to catch her arm, placing his thumb on a point and pressing just hard enough for her to stop.

“Korra’s sleeping upstairs.” His voice sounds nothing like him, the tone so close to imploring it makes him sick.

The girl twists her hand a little, putting two fingers to the same spot on his wrist. “I can be quiet if you are.” Pulling him closer, Kuvira whispers, “Come on, Noatak, don’t you think it’s about time to put some of that shame into proper use?”

To think that he is nothing if not conscientious…   
There really can’t be a worse time to realize how much (and how embarrassingly quickly) he wants Korra again. To talk to her, do something with her, anything.


End file.
